Tom,
It is difficult for me to get past my astonishment that of everyone in this Treehouse, you *particularly* would be the one who would lay that particular dig into the bleeding sore that has not healed to this day. Even harder to believe as a charter member of your damned fan club.
Let me respond in order of your assertions/questions:
#1. The exercise was framed within the assumption that money was no object. I promise you that *even* the dogmatic buffoons who inflict their mindless bullshit on good sense and rational land use would gladly trade the toxic cleanup of 500 acres of a military firing and munitions range for 150 acres of golf course. Dole and Ocean Mist farms are farming the adjoining properties - where they grow iceberg lettuce and perennial artichokes - so if nothing else, the other land owners would be thrilled to have the land next door suddenly have tangible value. Even the Enviro-Nazi's at the Sierra Club would cheer.
#2. If by some impossible chance, I had a permit to build a golf course west of Highway One at Fort Ord, I would certainly not build another "Macdonald Redux." The original suggestion a few years back by an obscure and forgotten golf scribe was to recreate "Lido" up north - a seed that we both know eventually germinated into the course you and Urbina are finishing off right now. It is nice to read in Time Magazine that Mike Keiser's desire to recreate Lido, the lost architectural masterpiece, was a "lifelong ambition." I studied at the feet of my hero George for many years, but it still does not sit well that an unrelated pedantic intellectual was automatically given a seat on the high council while I was left ignored. Maybe I am getting to be a bitter old man, but I have learned the hard way there is no reward for thinking outside the bun and blasting your ideas into the world. My years at Olympic were also a hard lesson.
So, if this circumstance comes to pass, I'll do one better. Dev Emmett's great-great grandson (if such a person exists) and I will wander about the nation (and Archerfield), sketch out the very best Tom Doak/Jim Urbina holes and sympathetically recreate a sort of "Doak Redux" there along Highway One in Seaside. If the puppet-masters bequeath upon us serfs the permits to build another 18, we'll start on the salient creations of your former cohorts and move forward. From Macdonald to Raynor to Charles Banks. DeVries and Kingsley Club can be the starting point, although Perry and P.B. might be a bit of a stretch. I'm guessing that we have enough genius for 36 holes without straying too far from the fountainhead.
I see where Barny gets his toxicity . . . . . . not that I condone or encourage it, but I am beginning to understand it.