VISION

Our Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Forward

Norman F. Anderson, Seth Kaufman

• Publisher: Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institut
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780578873312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Infrastrutture
• Index: Business

With his signature straightforward candor, Washington D.C. infrastructure guru Norman F. Anderson unleashes a fascinating, nation-saving plan for the future that is rooted in two questions: What will the U.S. look like in 2030, and what do we want it to look like? Anderson's analysis is driven by the crisis facing America as the cornerstones of society - vast, fast highways; power stations; and telecommunications networks - languish from lack of funds, while the huge opportunity in new infrastructure, including AI, 5G, and new forms of mobility, are set-up to drive extraordinary productive and opportunity across the U.S. economy. What do we need? Leadership, political will, and, ultimately an engaging vision. The answers he offers are equal parts inspiring, terrifying and utterly sensible.

In twelve chapters, Anderson explores the nature and power of vision, demonstrating that, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds in real-time, driven by 5G, machine learning and AI, infrastructure must become the essential strategic pillar of American society - one that, if built and nurtured, will bolster our economy, job market, national security and quality of life. It's where the battlefield on which our bifurcated battle with China is being played out.

Anderson uncovers the vast obstacles that have crippled infrastructure growth in the U.S. over the last thirty years and talks to industry veterans and cutting edge-technologists about shifting from a broken system to one that works - and one that will once again allow the U.S. to drive infrastructure growth around the world (especially in the critical areas of health and mobility). Along the way, he shares the mind-bending projects of the future that are under development, explains the dangers of failing to counter China's explosive infrastructure growth, and provides our leaders in Washington with a ten-point plan to remake America as an infrastructure leader.

Engaging, timely and daring, Vision: Our Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Forward turns the stereotyped perceptions of infrastructure on their head. Infrastructure is not tedious subject-matter for wonks who love constructing roads and power-lines - it is core to our economic and social strategy, the DNA that will define our society. And this book is an eye-opening treatise on how to create a future that works for all of us.

Norman F. Anderson
with Seth Kaufman

Copyright

Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institute

729 15th St. NW

Suite 600

Washington, D.C. 20005

Copyright © 2021 by Norman F. Anderson

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email [email protected]

First Edition March 2021

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-578-87330-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-578-87331-2

Dedication

To the memory of my parents, their love, support and boundless ambition for their children.

Norman J. Anderson, USMC (ret.) - 1913 - 2009

Irene Fernandez Anderson - 1916 - 2019

And to my granddaughter, Elyse Irene Anderson Darling, and the next generation—may we build a great future for all of us!

Table of Contents

Introduction. Why I Wrote This Book

Chapter 1. Our Country in 2030—Who Do We Want to Be?

Chapter 2. Why Infrastructure, Why Now & Why the Debate Goes Nowhere

Chapter 3. Strategic Projects—What We’re Fighting For

Chapter 4. Creating Vital & Strategic Institutions

Chapter 5. Technology—The Creative Explosions in Our Midst

Chapter 6. Ownership—Bringing ‘US’ Into the Equation

Chapter 7. Vision: Creating the World We Want

Chapter 8. Leadership—Creating a Magic Wand for Citizens

Chapter 9. Policy & Innovation—Common Sense Security

Chapter 10. Companies—Creating Great Things?

Chapter 11. Global Leadership—Democracy and Freedom

Chapter 12. Ten Action Items: A Sustained 2X Increase in Investment—Driven by Infrastructure Heroes

Acknowledgments

About the Author & the SIPI

List of Exhibits/Maps and Graphs

Exhibits/Maps

The First Map of the Interstate Highway System, 1939

Curated List of the Top 500 U.S. Strategic Infrastructure Projects

U.S. High Voltage Transmission Grid—Three Separate Networks

The Gateway Tunnel Project, Jobs in 52 Congressional Districts

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Map

Fiber Optic Trunk Lines Crossing the U.S.

Graphs

U.S. v. China GDP (Business as Usual)

Public Sector Capacity

GM’S Brightdrop

A New Infrastructure Paradigm

The Infrastructure Brand, Globally and in the U.S.

Pension Fund Survey

National Debt

U.S. v. China Renewable Energy Jobs

The U.S. Global Infrastructure Retreat, 2002-2017

The Infrastructure Rise of China, 2002 v. 2017

Emerging Market GDP, 2020-2025

Belt & Road Investment, Selected Countries

Belt & Road Project Focus

White House Specialized Infrastructure Unit Poll

U.S Infrastructure Spending Sources

INTRODUCTION.
Why I Wrote This Book

“Where there is no vision the people perish.”
—Proverbs

Looking back from Thanksgiving 2030, I’m stunned by what’s happened to my country. Ten years ago, we were at each other’s throats, eyes closed to economic decline, suffering individually, lashing out collectively. Now, after a decade of growth—over 3 percent average per year—the mighty U.S. economy is no longer an exercise in managed decline or a dumpster fire of zero sum progress, but again a model for the world. It is again how we like to think of ourselves, a City on a Hill. And in all the right ways—liberty, opportunity and equity seem to have driven a decade of Roaring Productivity.

This book is about how we can make that happen. The story of how we can wake up and rouse ourselves is an exciting one, full of new ideas about technology, funding, institutions that give us a voice, and above all a vision of where we are going. As I write in early 2021, there is no single catalyst that will allow us to gather ourselves, wake ourselves up from a very bad dream—the nightmare of bickering, the beggar-thy-neighbor thinking and everything else that culminated in that shocking day—January 6, 2021—when the U.S. Capitol was overrun while lawmakers were certifying a presidential election. We didn’t like what we saw, at all.

This is the story of how our country can roar back. Not because of one decision, but because of a big change in attitude and a series of strategic investment decisions—making big bets on the future in infrastructure and everything else that matters in the life of a great nation facing a dramatic set of technological and industrial challenges—and opportunities.

This is the story of the decisions we need to make—big decisions—driving our country into a future that will give us all hope, include us all, and make us all proud.

Vision is a word that seems to live in that netherworld between describing a prophet and describing crazy. That makes it interesting. We all know we need vision. It gives us the “ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom,” according to the dictionary. There are qualities about it, layers to that dictionary definition. “Think about or plan” suggests a kind of system, a learned or proposed way of doing something—using scenarios on the one hand, “going with your gut” on the other. Notwithstanding that minefield, we need to plan the future—and Webster’s suggestion that we plan “with imagination” is probably an essential ingredient. As Einstein said, “Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere.”¹ This book gives you glimpses of the future—imaginative glimpses to be sure—of how we as a country can get to where we want to be.

I like the last part of the dictionary definition most of all: “or wisdom.” Getting to the promised land, in 2030 and beyond, requires a different mix of skills than what got us where we are now. “Thank goodness,” you may say, but it’s complicated.

The challenge and opportunities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution—electrification and digitization, a digital world involving Artificial Intelligence (AI) and high-speed communications networks that facilitate machines talking to machines and learning from each other—require the usual doses of hard work, ingenuity, entrepreneurship and empathy. But this time we are going to need an active public sector that is world-class at optimizing the public commons, the creation of the public good. Wisdom—not just about making money or distributing money—needs a seat at the table more than at any time in our nation’s history since the early years of the Republic.

I wrote this book because our country is in trouble and we seem stuck in the moment. We need a vision and a roadmap for getting there as a way to jolt the country to action.

We are a great country, but we are stuck. Nowhere are we more stuck than in infrastructure investment—that strategic mode by which a modern country projects and creates the future. Spain has a high-speed rail network (we don’t), Denmark generates 47 percent of its electricity from wind² (we’re at 9 percent), Singapore’s metro set a record in 2020 with 1 million train miles between delays³ (Washington, D.C.’s metro system offers up a delay every 65,000 miles), and China’s engineering/construction companies are anywhere from 500 percent to 2,000 percent larger than our biggest builders.⁴ China and our Nordic friends constantly contrast their decades-long planning cycles with our besotted fixation on quarterly results.

There is another sense of vision that is our greatest strength.

Vision is an internal thing, the fiery energy of individual liberty that, when we thread the needle of the commons, of the creation of public goods like infrastructure, makes us unbeatable. In that regard, this book is an urgent call to action. Napoleon said, “Let China sleep. For when she wakes, the world will tremble”⁵—and in that vein the aphorism that drives this book is this: “If we can wake America up, then the power and glory of our individual liberty will once again light the world.”

On Infrastructure

Infrastructure has shifted as technology has evolved. Every day, the vast majority of Americans wake up and benefit from clean water, electricity, good travel, fast-arriving goods and incredible communications. Infrastructure projects used to get us “there”—they were the public works structures that led to improved health, that provided electricity to new businesses, and the bridges—often literally—to the creation of good, well-paying jobs. An example close to home was my grandfather’s 1898 founding of the Oslo Power and Light Company to bring power to the Norwegian farmers in the Two Rivers and Manitowoc regions of Wisconsin. Now, with computer technology and the rise of actionable data, the notion of infrastructure is deepening, and profoundly so. Infrastructure can still perform its old, vital functions, but now it is a less inert structure, and is quickly becoming the brains of our economy. Increasingly, it works seamlessly with the digital world to create improved efficiencies, utilize big data and make some jobs obsolete while generating wonderful new categories of work. The highway of the future, like the one the Strategic Infrastructure Performance Institute⁶ is designing for U.S. Route 30 in Ohio, won’t be just a road of steel and concrete, it will be a logistics platform, integrated by sensors to a series of networks, knitting our production and service economies together, from coast to coast. The highway will allow connectivity to and from autonomous vehicles, ensure rural broadband and create revenue for businesses, local government and car owners by generating, using and selling data—truly the oil of the 21st century.

I’m not alone in my thinking. Bryn Fosburgh, senior vice president of Trimble, a leading provider of high-tech industrial solutions, sees the future this way: “The onset of electric vehicles [EVs], reduced personal vehicle ownership, and autonomy will require our current transportation network to change in design, and we will need to focus on final mile transportation. Our transportation network of the future will be a platform for digital communications and charging our EVs. This will also become the main funding source for the networks for the future. Also, visualization and remote interaction will be a key component and require high bandwidth and fast communications both when traveling and stationary at your workplace. The Holodeck from Star Trek is fictional, but the more you can visualize and do scenario planning, the less you need to travel. Is our Eisenhower highway in the future digital? Probably.”⁷

This makes infrastructure investment a strategic priority, a first-order priority of the state—along with national defense, economic health, education and health care. This book makes the argument that a strategic program of infrastructure investment is essential to the achievement of those other priorities—and without that investment, at this time of challenge, we will not succeed, period.

Every president elected since 1992 reached the White House by promising infrastructure investment as a top-level priority. We all know in our bones that is the foundation of our country, so our leaders play that theme during campaign season. Once the election is over, however, infrastructure becomes “the next priority,” after health care, tax reform, Covid recovery, immigration, the global climate threat, and so on. That’s not a complaint, it’s a simple fact.

I argue that the culprit is an absence of vision, a big problem that threatens our country. This book highlights not just why infrastructure is important, but identifies the roadmap—and the will—required to invest with confidence in our future. Our circumstances on this earth have changed. Vision—foresight with commitment, imagination and wisdom—always involves risk, but our current strategy of doing nothing is by far the greatest risk of all. By 2030 there will be as many as 100 billion ARM sensors producing more data every year than has been produced in the history of humanity, including the data from the year before.⁸ Our future must shape this data to our needs, creating for the seven billion people on our planet, and for the 330 million in our country, a future that engages us and inspires us. Strategic infrastructure is the array of tools—immensely creative tools limited only by the power of our vision—to bend the future to our needs.

Background

I write these words just weeks after one mob briefly took over the Capitol, and a virtual mob of small investors briefly took over the stock exchange.⁹ There is a lot of anger out there, a lot of people left behind. This is a big problem. Just as out of balance is the lack of reliable—trusted—public leadership in this country.

Another theme that runs through this book is that leadership must take care of the public commons, that the job is to make public space and public goods (of which infrastructure is the exemplar for our society) not just great, but symbolic of who we are and who we want to be. The front yard of America—our parks and public spaces, airports, highways, trains and transit facilities,...