Strong Angel

The first Strong Angel (SA-I) was held near Puu Pa'a, Waimea, on the Big Island of Hawaii in June 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 then-latest global communications technologies[2] and lessons learned from the social sciences.[3][4] That first Strong Angel, an ad hoc integration of UN relief agencies and international militaries working in concert toward a serious humanitarian problem 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.[5] 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.

The second Strong Angel (SA-II) was also held on a remote lava bed in Hawaii and, in 2004, pursued problems identified by members of the first Strong Angel team who were deployed to conflicts then underway in Afghanistan and Iraq. SA-II eventually incorporated 83 tasks designed to propose answers to problems seen in civil-military integration during those wartime deployments, including transboundary communications, civil-military transportation coordination, sustainable power provisioning, machine-based translation services, and competent cultural awareness. Over 60 staff on a remote and austere site on the lava beds north of Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, addressed that set of tasks. It resulted in alterations in tactics, techniques, and procedures regarding international and coalition civil-military operations.

The third in the Strong Angel series, SA-III in 2006 was designed to address problems seen in multiple natural and man-made disasters where Strong Angel members had 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 2005 Kashmir earthquake. SA-III was held in San Diego, California from 20–26 August 2006 with San Diego State University hosting 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 and there were more than 800 participants involved both locally on the ground in San Diego, and remotely in multiple countries around the world.

There were roughly 50 tasks and objectives identified for SA-III including the creation of community tools for use within a pandemic influenza response. The immediate goal after starting the demonstration was the development of a set of principles that would facilitate civil-military self-organization in future events. The overarching goal of the third SA event was more strategic than the first two events and promoted the development of tools and techniques for establishing a robust and resilient community-response capability for both natural and man-made disasters. The design of the week drew from the field experience of many agencies and entities with deep and successful experience in austere environments, including MedWeb for field diagnostics, telemedicine, and medical informatics, and the Naval Postgraduate School's Hastily Formed Networks for the urgent establishing of civil-military bridge mesh communications.

Among 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. Those relationships had previously served as a source of tension between the responder's procedural requirements and the stated needs of the people directly affected by the events, and some progress was made toward procedures that might alleviate that friction.

The tools and techniques proposed for answering the tasks were selected for testing and demonstration based on several criteria, but each needed to be commercially availability for international deployment by the end of the 2006 calendar year.

Fortunately, the idea of a collaborative civil-military international disaster response capability is now relatively routine. US INDO-PACIFIC Command in Hawaii, for example, has established Pacific Angel as an annual event commemorating the original Strong Angel series and similarly dedicated to work on civil-military collaboration around the Pacific Rim.. However, as of 2019, the threats from climate change posed to Pacific Atoll Nations by sea-level rise, overwash events, and fresh-water shortfalls has brought the Strong Angel series design - an international disaster response demonstration - back into active discussion. One aspect of Strong Angel III in San Diego, for example, had been focused on infectious pandemics and, in addition to changes in climate, a number of remote and vulnerable Pacific island nations are suffering from relatively new infectious diseases like chikungunya and Zika virus, and a resurgence of more familiar diseases like dengue, typhoid fever, and resistant tuberculosis. Each of those issues are embedded within changing ecosystems and might benefit from a re-visiting of the problem set last addressed formally in 2006. Now, however, those problems could be addressed using exponential advances in technology, epidemiology, and data visualization, and a much deeper understanding of systems science, to assess the interventions that might improve the resilience of those vulnerable communities.