CSIS and Infrastructure
By: Stephen CollierBob Herbert in today’s times has an op-ed on our decaying infrastructure that sounds like the late-1970s/early 1980s discussion. The column is not of much interest in itself, but refers to a CSIS Commission on Public Infrastructure that has been active (or has existed, at any rate) since 2004. There is a link to a 2006 panel on Guiding Principles for Strengthening America’s Infrastructure, and Herbert refers to recent testimony by Felix Rohatyn, the head of the Commission (who some will remember as a key player in negotiating New York City’s way out of financial crisis in the 1970s; sounds like a pretty interesting guy on other fronts as well). In any case, the interesting questions would obviously be: How do these proposals — classic questions of population security — relate to the substantial work in CSIS on Critical Infrastructure Protection? And is there any chance that these issues will get a different kind of hearing now that the democrats have more voice in the government? I wasn’t able to find the recent Rohatyn testimony, but this is one interesting possible space of movement in a shifted set of security emphases under new political conditions.