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We were told the reason for the Interrsate Highway System was indeed for increased mobility of troops. But with an ocean on each coast, a Normandy-like invasion would be extremely unlikely and mass troop movements to combat it an even more remote possibility.
No, the system was built to give the federal government control over interstate transportation and movement. We were sold a bill of goods. Just as the Feds give schools money then tell them how to spend it, they built highways and then proceeded to regulate their use.
I know someone will say my tinfoil hat is on too tightly, but I believe we are once again seeing "a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object", only this time the "object" is a one-world-government. This transportation corridor would be a concrete (no pun intended) method of dividing the USA in half and allowing our enemies better opportunities to take over individual states.

I disagree.

Every major military installation, Army, Navy, and AF has an interstate highway passing its gate.

It can be argued that the military necessity for the highway system has gone away, since deployment now is mostly by heavy lift aircraft, but the equipment still has to be moved from factory to military bases via ground.

Oldfart wrote:

We were told the reason for the Interrsate Highway System was indeed for increased mobility of troops.

Nobdysfool wrote:

It was built expressly (pardon the pun) for the purpose of being able to move troops and materiel quickly and efficiently in case of military necessity

I should like to correct this common misunderstanding of the origins of the "Eisenhower" Interstate Highway System. The military utility of the system was not the primary motive or purpose for it. However, the military rationale served two political needs in enacting the law:

1) It gave constitutional justification for the federal program;
2) It reflected and used for promotion of the road the national hysteria over the Russian H-Bomb.

Certainly Ike was committed to the military benefits of the road system. However, the military use was more catalyst than core purpose. And remember this: for military transport, the highways were redundant and relatively ineffective: the biggest and most efficient "road" system to move troops across the country was started by Ike's Republican ancestor, Abraham Lincoln and his Transcontinental Railroad.

People so easily forget that railroads are roads. The railroad system in this country was and still is amazing. It was built with public grants to private enterprise, and it built a nation. See here for a fabulous 1906 New York Times editorial praising Huntington's Southern Pacific line, which he built using public grants and "watered" stock:

"The Road of 1000 Wonders" (**warning: pdf file!)

The Interstate Highway system was launched by Congress by a coalition of the AAA (which had been lobbying for this system since 1911), New Dealers and their philosophical allies (who had long tried to build a national road system), and, most importantly, States that had not built their own highways. Those States turned to the federal government to pay for highways that the more advanced states had already built (mostly using privately-floated bonds financed by tolls).

Again, the military component of the system was rationale and a distant secondary impetus to the primary motives and purposes of the System, which were political.