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- Strong Angel is an informal consortium of agencies and organizations that have together hosted a series of international disaster response demonstrations leveraging public-private collaboration within a complex disaster response scenario. Since 1999 the Strong Angel series has focused on field experimentation within very challenging environments, testing the use of cutting-edge techniques and technologies to facilitate more effective humanitarian response. The name for the event, Strong Angel, was chosen to recognize two important influences in the humanitarian response sector. The first was "Operation Sea Angel" in 1991, an impromptu rescue operation led by General Henry Stackpole leading a US Navy Amphibious Task Force in urgent response to an unnamed cyclone in Bangladesh. That rescue operation is generally credited with saving up to 200,000 lives and stimulated the entire field of research around complex operations in humanitarian response. The second influence was the insightful DARPA Program Manager responsible for the original civil-military integration concept, Dr. Gary Strong. There are several specific sectors tested in each Strong Angel event, with the general goals of (1) improved information flow, (2) the provisioning of urgent and sustainable critical services, and (3) trans-boundary cooperation, all in the aftermath of a disaster. Each of the three Strong Angel demonstrations have been broadly international in nature, with more than 15 nations participating in the 2006 event. The ethos of the demonstration is "radical inclusion" on the supposition that good ideas can come from anywhere - and especially from within the communities most at risk. Everything created by any Strong Angel event is released to the public domain. Demonstrations have been held in 2000, 2004, and 2006, and the structural capability remains in 2019 within the Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities (C-RASC) at George Mason University in Washington DC, and in the STAR-TIDES network established in the aftermath of the 2006 Strong Angel event. (en)
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