Overview
Strong Angel III is a low-key demonstration of globally relevant methods for improving resilience within any community under pressure. As an ad hoc demonstration Strong Angel III has no dedicated staff, no official funding source, and no policy or tasking legitimacy, and that has generally been true of each of the previous Strong Angel demonstrations as well. Historically, however, the Strong Angel series has a modestly successful record of effective civ-mil interaction and interesting solution sets to vexing problems. We can also note that each prior demonstration has altered some aspect of corporate or governmental behavior over the long-term.
For Strong Angel III we noted that our collective experiences over the first few years of the 21st century have already demonstrated the value of developing a highly effective disaster-response capability within an isolated community. Recent events like the tsunami in South East Asia, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, earthquakes in Pakistan, and now the prospect of a serious avian influenza outbreak have all made clear the need for a broad coalition of interests to assist in developing a robust and resilient community response appropriate for many cities across the globe. That capability should be competent, flexible, familiar, and highly reliable, and should include as many aspects of a community as it can. Strong Angel III will look at a few tasks (currently more than 40) related to that goal.
San Diego State University will host the Strong Angel team during late August 2006 to pursue that design. The team is drawn from US government agencies, the military, First Responders, domestic and international humanitarian organizations, academia, and private volunteers. The Strong Angel III demonstration itself will consist of a complex series of tasks addressing challenges seen in the real-world. The goal will be the establishing of a model of community resilience in the face of adversity.
Strong Angel III is particularly designed to explore techniques and technologies that support the principle of resilience within a community that finds itself isolated and vulnerable. In the demonstration the citizens of a community are deprived of power, cell phones, and Internet access, and are beyond the immediate reach of federal assistance. One key objective of this project is to effectively tap the expertise and creativity within an affected community, including through public-private partnerships. A second overarching objective is the development of social tools and techniques that encourage collaborative cooperation between responders and the population they serve during post-disaster reconstruction.
Background
The previous two demonstrations labeled Strong Angel took place in 2000 and 2004. Each was an effort to evaluate best-of-breed solutions to social and technical communications problems identified in conflict locations like Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Each was well-regarded and was moderately successful in describing opportunities for improvement in civil-military communications.
Like the two previous demonstrations, Strong Angel III will stress the principles of inclusion, cooperative response integration, effective resource management, civil-military collaboration, and creative synthesis.
The scenario for Strong Angel III
Although Strong Angel is not played as an exercise, there are scenario determinants that serve to enforce initial conditions and ongoing constraints. The initial conditions are the following:
In August of 2006 many countries in the world find themselves in the grip of a lethal pandemic. Despite an historical recognition of limited quarantine effectiveness, many areas in the US, like most urban centers across the globe, are under quarantine, enforced by the National Guard, and movement is highly restricted. As the virus spreads, regional hospitals and clinics are rapidly overwhelmed and alternate care sites appear anywhere they can, perhaps in nursing homes, schools, and stadiums. As the weeks drag on and workers manning public utilities fall ill, critical infrastructure begins to falter.
As the scenario unfolds, public health officials soon express urgent concern that a loss of their own regional communications system would have a significant impact since they would be unable to effectively coordinate disease containment and resource allocation. The city seeks help from the national capitol, but the central government is occupied with both the national crisis and with local outbreaks that have placed the central government itself in isolation. The city is told that they must ride out the initial phase alone.
None of this escapes the notice of disruptive organizations. Such groups have long understood that it is possible to do a great deal of harm by watching for (or triggering) an initial event, and then using a secondary attack against responders in order to amplify the morbidity of the original event. Well-versed in techniques of information warfare, they launch a series of cyber-attacks spread out over the course of several hours, targeting critical infrastructure at vulnerable nodes. Grid power is lost for the entire region and, with it, most Internet access. Restoration of services is hampered by illness, quarantine, and confusion. The local community, along with those military personnel deployed to enforce the quarantine, is faced with mounting their own response to these very difficult circumstances.
Implementation Plan
- Strong Angel III will be held in several locations near downtown San Diego, centered within the old Naval Recruit Training Center. The central site, on the abandoned third floor of an open-bay barracks, will include space for meeting areas, work areas, networking and communications equipment, and independent power and light. It will be staffed 24 hours a day.
- Over the course of a week, as the scenario unfolds, a team will conduct tasks to explore solutions proposed for lessons learned in Iraq, the South Asian tsunami response, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Each task is designed to improve the resilience of a community anywhere in the world that finds itself under multiple pressures and with little outside support.
- The tasks reflect problems experienced by members of the Strong Angel team in the real world. Some of these tasks will showcase cutting-edge technologies, products, and solutions from both the public and private sectors. Others will focus on the non-technical aspects of mutual aid, self-sustainment, and collaborative cooperation.
- The tasks will address a range of technical and sociological topics including redundant power, adaptive communications, austere network conditions, mobile workers, cross-organizational collaboration, mesh networking, satellite services, ephemeral workgroups, geospatial information systems, rapid assessment techniques, shared situational awareness, cyber security, alerting tools, community informatics, machine-based translation for multi-lingual communication, and social network development.
- As the demonstration unfolds, the Executive Team will begin to introduce additional challenges and constraints -- technical, social, operational, and environmental -- characteristic of humanitarian operations. Our goal is to exert pressure on existing solution teams in such a way that they are forced to adapt to evolving requirements on the fly; teams are expected to respond by collaborating with one another and recombining components and approaches from previous experiments into novel solutions.
- Review our web site at www.strongangel3.org for a more extensive description.
- Contact info@strongangel3.org for more information.
