Military’s Changing Role Displayed in Hawaii

Strong winds whipped up the volcanic dust, swirling it through cracks in the tent and into the eyes of Marine Col. Mark Nixon. “A team of aid workers came across a minefield while looking for refugees,” he said, squinting at his laptop computer. “Two individuals were killed.”

The minefield and deaths weren’t real. But most everything else about “Strong Angel,” a humanitarian exercise designed to help the military handle refugee crises worldwide, was true to life.

“They’ve made this very realistic,” said UNICEF representative Peter McDermott, who came from Zambia to this barren slope on Mauna Kea to watch 125 refugees--Hawaiians playing members of a traumatized ethnic minority group--test the logistical mettle of the U.S. military and United Nations aid workers. “They’ve even put on the weather. I knew the military were organized, but I didn’t realize they were this organized.”

The brainchild of Vice Adm. Dennis McGinn--commander of the Navy’s San Diego-based U.S. Third Fleet--this week’s Strong Angel exercise recognizes the shifting role of the U.S. military. Since the end of the Cold War, American troops have been joining in more multinational efforts to handle humanitarian emergencies, such as refugees displaced by ethnic conflict in developing countries.

“We recognize that, while it’s not why we are formed as a navy, we increasingly will be called upon to handle humanitarian disaster relief operations,” McGinn said. “This exercise provides us with an opportunity to get together with nongovernmental organizations to very deliberately work through better ways of cooperating--without the pressure of people actually getting sick and dying and the risk of physical harm.”

Strong Angel is part of the Rim of the Pacific 2000, the largest naval exercise in the world, which has massed more than 50 ships and submarines, 200 aircraft and 22,000 troops from seven countries in Hawaii this month. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNICEF and the U.N.’s World Food Programme all sent top staff members to participate in the humanitarian training.

Traditionally, international relief agencies have kept their distance from the military, but attitudes are changing because aid workers are being killed at an unprecedented rate.

“As much as it’s important to keep humanitarian operations neutral, the unfortunate reality in the post-Cold War world is that . . . we need each other more and more,” said Abigail Spring, public affairs officer for the U.N. World Food Programme. “We’re dealing in countries where there’s no real authority and rule of law. In many cases, we couldn’t do our job without the military.”

To help launch Strong Angel, a U.N. aid team was invited aboard the USS Coronado, anchored off the resort town of Kona. Amphibious craft then brought ashore all the vehicles and equipment needed to set up two tent cities near the Kohala Mountains, 2,500 feet above sea level. One housed the Civilian Military Operations Center, the other the “refugees” and relief workers--since some aid agencies want to avoid direct contact with the military.

The refugees arrived aboard 5-ton trucks, jostling over terrain so rough it knocked the wheel off one Humvee. They acted out assigned roles, trying to confound aid workers who issued photo identification tags and screened the arrivals for medical conditions. Although the volunteer refugees had been promised hot showers, a broken water main in nearby Waimea cut off the supply to their camp. Instead, they filled water bottles from a mobile tank and sponged off the dirt as best they could.

“You figure that’s what’s going to happen in a real disaster situation,” Darline Rita, a Red Cross volunteer from Kauai, said with a shrug. “It gives us an idea of how it feels from the refugee’s point of view. We had the tent totally zipped up, and still the dust and sand was seeping in.”

But the experience was a little too real for some participants. “I want a shower,” pleaded Shelly Ching, a Kona homemaker. “In my role as a refugee, I’m supposed to be walking around traumatized and mumbling, but I haven’t gotten out of grumble mode,” she said. “I was up at 1 o’clock this morning because the roof of my tent blew off.”

One of the goals of Strong Angel is to bridge the gulf that separates the military and the various U.N. agencies and nonprofit groups.

For example, civilian organizations buy radios and walkie-talkies off the shelf, while most military radios are produced under contract. With incompatible equipment, the two sides can’t talk to each other. One simple solution was tried here: The military commander carried a U.N. radio along with his own, while his U.N. counterparts carried a military radio as well. On a more sophisticated level, a wireless computer network was set up that linked aid workers in the refugee camp to the military’s command centers on shore and aboard ship.

Since communication failures can be as much a matter of personal style as equipment, sociologists monitored the interaction between civilians and military over the course of the week, hoping to draw lessons for future real-world engagements.

“We come from fundamentally different cultures,” McDermott said. “The military is very command-and-control, top-down, hierarchical, while we are much more collaborative, consensual and diverse. Our missions also differ. The point of this exercise is to determine where we can work together and also understand where we won’t be able to work together. There has beena lot of eye-opening on both sides.”

Along with fostering civilian-military cooperation, the Strong Angel exercise is testing how well cutting-edge technology will function in an austere environment. When conventional generators were delayed in arriving from the ship, for example, the solar experiment kicked into gear early and powered the tents. And in one army-green tent, a Korean-speaking “defector” was interviewed, with a computer acting as two-way simultaneous interpreter.

“People are probably thinking that these folks [taking part in the exercise] are at the beach under a palm tree,” said Judee Burgoon, a communications professor at the University of Arizona who was one of those studying Strong Angel. “They have no notion of how absolutely daunting this is and the duress under which these people are working. They have put themselves in a situation that truly tests them to the max.”