Strong Angel

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Strong Angel II site in Kona, Hawaii, July 2004

Strong Angel is the name of a series of civil-military demonstrations that show methods for civilian and military agencies around the world to work effectively together within a disaster response. The Strong Angel demonstration series focuses on experimentation in the use of cutting-edge techniques and technologies to facilitate improved information flow and cooperation across the civil-military boundary in post-disaster and post-conflict field environments. The Strong Angel demonstrations are broadly international in nature, and anything created by Strong Angel is given away to the public domain.

1 Team
2 Demonstration Series
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Team

Strong Angel demonstrations are designed and performed by a globally distributed team of experts led by Eric Rasmussen, MD, MDM, FACP, a former US Navy Commander. In 2006, Dr. Rasmussen served as the Chairman of the Department of Medicine and Director of the Hospitalist and Critical Care Program within Naval Medical Center Bremerton. He was appointed also as the Special Advisor in Humanitarian Informatics for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and as an Adjunct Full Professor within the College of Sciences and the School of Public Health at San Diego State University. After retiring from the Navy in 2007 following 25 years of active service, for which he received the Legion of Merit, Dr. Rasmussen became the CEO of InSTEDD, a non-profit organization focused on global public health information sharing.

Members of the Strong Angel team include medical, military, humanitarian, and technology experts. These team members are drawn from many walks of life: public and private sectors, civilian and military, domestic and international, including engineers, UN staff, humanitarian NGO workers, academic researchers, journalists, policy makers, and active duty military officers^[1]. In addition to having direct operational responsibilities in Bosnia, Turkey, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Indonesia, and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, the team has performed two specific technology demonstrations: Strong Angel I (2000) and Strong Angel II (2004).

[edit] Demonstration Series

[edit] Strong Angel I

The first Strong Angel (SA-I) was held near Puu Pa'a on the Big Island of Hawaii in June of 2000 to address problems seen in the international response to the Kosovo refugee migration. Strong Angel participants established a distributed medical intelligence communications infrastructure at a mock refugee camp using the latest global communications technologies^[2] and lessons learned from the social sciences. That first Strong Angel, an ad-hoc integration of UN relief agencies and international militaries working in concert toward a serious humanitarian problem, was unusually effective and, at the time, generated positive press in both domestic US and international newspapers and magazines. Several reasons were proposed for the success, but credit must be given to the early support received from senior UN field staff present within the earliest planning conferences that were hosted by the US Navy^[3]. Benefit was also derived from the senior military commander at Strong Angel mandating military participation in a humanitarian effort at a level equal to the intensity required for combat. That requirement was later incorporated within the 2005 US Department of Defense Directive 3000.05, the seminal document mandating that the US military become effective at stability, security, transition and reconstruction (SSTR) operations, a subset of which is military support to humanitarian operations.

[edit] Strong Angel II

The second Strong Angel (SA-II) was also held on a remote lava bed in Hawaii and pursued problems identified by members of the first Strong Angel team who were later deployed to post-9/11 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. SA-II eventually incorporated 83 tasks designed to propose answers to problems seen in civil-military integration during those conflict deployments, including such topics as trans-boundary communications, civil-military transportation coordination, sustainable power provisioning, machine-based translation services, and extensive cultural awareness. Those tasks were each eventually completed, with variable degrees of success, through the efforts of more than 60 staff on a remote and austere site near Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.

[edit] Strong Angel III

The third in the Strong Angel series (SA-III) was designed to address problems seen in multiple natural and man-made disasters where Strong Angel members have deployed since 2004. Those events include the South Asian Tsunami in December 2004, Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, Hurricane Rita in September 2005, and the Pakistan earthquake in October 2005. SA-III was held in San Diego, California from 20-26 August 2006. San Diego State University hosted the Strong Angel team. The team members were drawn from US government agencies, international and domestic militaries, First Responders, domestic and international humanitarian organizations, academia, and private volunteers.

There were roughly 50 objectives and tasks identified for SA-III and they incorporate the development of community tools for use within a pandemic influenza response, with an emphasis on self-organizing and self-distributing principles. The overarching goal is the development of tools and techniques for promoting a robust and resilient community-response capability for both natural and man-made disasters. One of the other objectives within SA-III was the development of social tools and techniques that encourage collaborative cooperation between responders and the population they serve during post-disaster reconstruction, a consistent source of tension between the responder's procedural requirements and the stated needs of the people directly affected by the events.

The tools and techniques proposed for answering the tasks were selected for testing and demonstration based on their availability for international deployment at little or no cost by the end of the 2006 calendar year. Further information about the Strong Angel III demonstration, including the detailed task list, can be found on the SA-III website.