- Q. What is Strong Angel III
- A. Strong Angel III is a week-long series of demonstrations and experiments conducted by volunteers from the private and public sectors to trial and exhibit how integrated technologies and techniques can improve information flow and cooperation across civil and military boundaries in delivering humanitarian relief efforts to victims of disasters and conflicts.
- Q. Where is Strong Angel III taking place?
- A. Strong Angel III’s core operations center is the San Diego Fire Department Fire Rescue Training Facility site, located at the former Naval Training Center near downtown San Diego. The site will host the demonstration participants throughout its buildings, grounds and parking lots during the event. SDSU’s Visualization Center, the secondary site of operations, will be the central point for information processing, mapping and incoming visual footage and data from remote cameras at the Fire Rescue Training Facility and from satellite sites throughout San Diego County.
- Q. What are the dates of Strong Angel III?
- A. August 21 – 26, 2006.
- Q. Where did the concept for Strong Angel come from?
- A. 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. You can find additional information about Strong Angel I, the team, and previous demonstrations within the Strong Angel article on the Wikipedia website at www.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Angel.
- Q. What are the primary goals of Strong Angel III?
- A. To field-test and demonstrate effective means of delivering life-saving humanitarian relief in the wake of natural and man-made disasters, to foster close collaboration and communications between aid agencies, governments and military in providing disaster relief, to provide local communities with solutions that will help them cope with disasters more immediately and effectively, and to enable military forces to better prepare for and execute humanitarian relief efforts in the 21st century.
- Q. Who runs Strong Angel III?
- A. Strong Angel demonstrations are designed and performed by a globally distributed team of experts led by Eric Rasmussen, MD, MDM, FACP, a US Navy Commander on active duty, and a professor at San Diego State University. 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. 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).
In addition to Dr. Rasmussen, the Strong Angel III Executive Committee includes Dr. Eric Frost, professor, San Diego State University; Brian Steckler, professor, US Navy Postgraduate School; Robert Kirkpatrick, lead architect, Microsoft Humanitarian Systems; Dr. Nigel Snoad, lead researcher, Microsoft Humanitarian Systems; Peter Griffiths, director, ISR Programs, Office of the Secretary of Defense, NII Directorate; Doug Hanchard, Signature Engagements, Bell Canada; Milton Chen, CTO, VSee Lab; John Crowley, Web and IS architect, Strong Angel III; Gay Mathews, CEO, North Hawaii Credit Union; Suzanne Mikawa, Informatics Coordinator, Strong Angel III.
- Q. Where does funding for Strong Angel III come from?
- A. Funding for Strong Angel III comes from some public sector monies, as well as donations from private industry. Strong Angel III has received funding from Microsoft Corp., Bell Canada, Cisco Systems, Sprint Nextel, Save the Children, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Dept. of Defense, and CommsFirst. The Strong Angel III actual budget is $200,000, plus an estimated $4 million in donated personnel, equipment and facility resources.
- Q. What will happen at Strong Angel III?
- A. Strong Angel III team members will conduct field trials and demonstrations of solutions that address 49 specific humanitarian relief challenges – both technical and social – that have not yet been adequately overcome in real disaster relief efforts. These experiments and demonstrations will be conducted in adverse environments within the context of a simulated lethal pandemic caused by a highly contagious virus, which is further complicated by the modeling of a wave of cyber attacks that cripple critical local infrastructure and Strong Angel III systems.
- The Strong Angel III Executive Committee will issue a lessons-learned document on its web site near the end of the year.
- Q. So is Strong Angel III another mock civil defense exercise, or a trade show of new technologies?
- A. No. Strong Angel III is neither a simulated civil defense exercise nor a trade show, but a working disaster response laboratory in which social and technical experiments to vexing humanitarian relief challenges will be conducted under austere and varying conditions to demonstrate their viability in accomplishing specified tasks, and in successfully interoperating with other systems and techniques being deployed. These experiments are based on lessons learned in past disaster relief efforts and on emerging requirements for broadly integrated operations.
- Q. How will this be done?
- A. After initial set-up, teams from various organizations will spend the first few days conducting pre-defined experiments intended to meet one or more demonstration objectives. During the second half of the week, the Executive Committee will introduce additional challenges and constraints – technical, social, operational and environmental – characteristic of real-world humanitarian relief operations. The goal is to apply pressure to teams, forcing them to adapt on the fly to rapidly changing conditions while accomplishing their demonstration objectives. Each day will conclude with a briefing where team leaders will have a chance to share observations and lessons.
- Q. Where and why were the first two Strong Angel exercises held?
- A. The first Strong Angel was held near Puu Pa’a on the Big Island of Hawaii in June 2000. It was designed to address problems seen in the international response to the Kosovo refugee migration. Strong Angel participants established and distributed medical intelligence communications infrastructure at a mock refugee camp using the latest global communications technologies and lessons learned from the social sciences.
In 2004, Strong Angel II was held on a remote lava bed near Waikaloa, Hawaii. The Strong Angel team pursued problems identified by members of the first Strong Angel team who were later deployed to post-9/11 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Strong Angel II incorporated 83 tasks designed to propose answers to problems seen in civil-military integration during those conflict deployments, including 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.
- Q. What lessons were learned from the first two Strong Angel demonstrations?
- A. Among the many findings of these trials and demonstrations were the following:
- Technology cannot substitute for personal interaction.
- Know the cultures and issues that surround you.
- Work on building communications networks as you begin to plan.
- Centralize planning and decentralize execution.
- A Civil-Military operations center is indispensable.
- Q. Have lessons from the first Strong Angels directly benefitted relief efforts since they were held and analyzed?
- A. Yes. Members of the Strong Angel Executive Committee have been directly involved in humanitarian relief efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, the post-Hurricane Katrina Gulf area of the U.S., the Indonesian earthquake, the Pakistan earthquake, and within Darfur, Sudan, where Strong Angel innovations were applied.
- Q. What public and private sector organizations are participating in Strong Angel III?
- A. In addition to sponsorship by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Strong Angel III will have on-the-ground participation from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, state and local first-responders, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. Joint Forces Command, U.S. Northern Command, NATO, the United Nations, several humanitarian non-government organizations, and colleagues from several nations, including Canada, England, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Sweden and Turkey.
From the private sector, a select group of commercial technology vendors has been invited to demonstrate their best solutions, including Microsoft, Google, Motorola, MITRE, Cisco, CH2M Hill, Bell Canada and U.S. Corporate Networks. Several universities also will participate, including host San Diego State University, Harvard University, Kabul University, and The Georgia Institute of Technology. The complete list of participating organizations is available from the Strong Angel III web site.
- Q. How will lessons learned from Strong Angel III be disseminated to potential beneficiaries?
- A. A summary report on lessons learned from Strong Angel III, including how individual trials and demonstrations performed, will be posted on the Strong Angel III Web site as soon as possible upon conclusion of Strong Angel III. For more information, contact Lorena Nava, San Diego State University, (619) 594-3952 (office), (619) 309-5179 (cell); or lnava@mail.sdsu.edu.
- Q. Who are the Strong Angel observers and how were they selected?
- A. Observers at SA-III in San Diego have been asked by the SA-III Executive Committee to participate as observers. These observers, who include academic researchers as well as stakeholders from civil-military organizations who can benefit directly from lessons learned during the demonstration, actually play an active role. Observers are asked to participate in the “conversation” that occurs throughout the week-long demonstration by adding their insights, knowledge and observations to what’s occurring.
- Q. Will participants at Strong Angel III test or release any classified material at the Strong Angel III demonstration?
- A. Due to the highly collaborative nature of SA-III, participating organizations are strongly encouraged to refrain from deploying any technology that would require members of any other organization to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. No classified material of any kind is to be brought onto the SA-III site because such materials cannot be easily shared with others during humanitarian operations and as such have no utility within Strong Angel III. The SA-III Executive Committee prefers that software vendors integrating their products with those of other participating organizations avoid using unpublished interfaces. One of the desired outcomes of the demonstration is to identify loosely-coupled, lightweight and flexible solutions that can be deployed anywhere in the world for disaster response.
- Q. In addition to national and international aid agencies, will Strong Angel III lessons and solutions also benefit local governments?
- A. Yes. In fact, one of Strong Angel III’s primary goals is to demonstrate the viability of specific humanitarian relief solutions that will enable local authorities to conduct most of their own local humanitarian relief work with minimal outside assistance.
- Q. What role will the international participants play during the demonstration? China, in particular?
- A. Our international participants will serve as resource and reach back for cultural, linguistic, and technical insights while developing relationships that may prove geographically relevant in the future.
- Q. Why was the particular scenario of a spreading contagious virus and simultaneous cyber attack chosen for Strong Angel III? Is there an indication of increased threat against the U.S. and/or participating nations regarding these kinds of dangers?
- A. The pandemic and cyber attack scenarios were selected from a range of possibilities because they gave the simplest and most relevant opportunity to exercise resilience, self-reliance, and trans-boundary cooperation.
- Q. Why was the name Strong Angel used?
- A. The name derives from two historical and highly relevant sources. Operation Sea Angel was a very successful civil-military operation in humanitarian support after a devastating Bangladesh monsoon in 1991. Dr. Gary Strong was the DARPA Program Manager who funded the first Strong Angel demonstration for Dr. Eric Rasmussen in 2000.
- Q. How can I as an individual or a company get involved with the Strong Angel program?
- A.
- 1. Cash donations are always welcome through our website at www.strongangel3.net.
- 2. Experienced field technologists and those with social networking expertise are welcome to register on the Volunteer for SA-III page at http://www.strongangel3.net/forum. Please describe carefully the skills you can bring to the problems we are addressing. If there is another Strong Angel in the future, the gap will likely be several years, and volunteers should anticipate that time frame.
