STAR-TIDES Background and History

STAR-TIDES evolved from several inter-related initiatives, over several years. These include  (1) The National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue (NIUSR), (2) The Strong Angel series of international disaster response demonstrations, (3) Synergy Strike Force crowdsourcing activities in Afghanistan, (4) the Golden Phoenix series of civil-military-volunteer preparedness exercises in California, (5) the Highlands Forum, (6) the Hexayurt project, (7) the Expedient Infrastructures for Transient Populations (EITP) concept for making commercial off-the-shelf products available for displaced or mobile populations, and (8) the Transformative Infrastructure for Development and Emergency Support (TIDES) project at the National Defense University (NDU).

Note: The relationships between TIDES and STAR-TIDES are as follows:

• TIDES (Transformative Infrastructures for Development and Emergency Support) is a DoD project that was founded in 2007 to use largely commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products to support four mission areas: (1) Building Partnership Capacity, (2) Defense Support of Civil Authorities [US domestic disaster relief], (3) Foreign Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief, (4) Support to Stabilization or Peacekeeping Operations.  Civil-military collaboration is a prime objective.
• STAR-TIDES (Sharing To Accelerate Research + TIDES) evolved as an adjunct to TIDES to form a global knowledge-sharing network that eventually reached several thousand nodes ranging from universities in Asis to NGOs in Europe and Africa, to elements of the US government, academia, and business.  It is public-private, whole of government, transnational.
• STAR-TIDES is now coordinated with the Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities (C-RASC) at George Mason.  It is focused on building sustainable resilience and improving emergency response.  TIDES remains a DoD program coordinated through the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) at Monterey.

The National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue (NIUSR), founded by Lois Clark McCoy, served as a model for education and inspiration regarding all aspects of search and rescue.  It led to a remarkable team of collaborators who extended Lois’ energy and expertise into a wide range of safety, educational, and civil-military engagements.  Many of the relationships and concepts developed through NIUSR have continued over decades and contributed to the development of STAR-TIDES.

Strong Angel was an informal consortium of agencies and organizations that hosted a series of international disaster response demonstrations in 2000, 2004 and 2006 which leveraging public-private collaboration within complex disaster response scenarios.  Led by Dr. Eric Rasmussen, the lessons learned and relationships developed from Strong Angel were instrumental in the concepts and principles that have been incorporated into STAR-TIDES. Colleagues from NIUSR and Strong Angel also deployed to Indonesia to support relief operations after the Boxing Day tsunami (December 26, 2004).

The Synergy Strike Force was the informal name of a group of individuals who applied crowdsourcing techniques towards development work in Afghanistan. Dave Warner, an MD, neuroscientist, and Army veteran, led the group.  Centered on the “Taj Mahal” guest house in Jalalabad, the Synergy Strike Force facilitated technical solutions that brought broad bandwidth where none had existed before, innovative collaborative arrangements, diverse data sharing, and an environment of “radical inclusion” which was unprecedented in the conflict zone.  These ideas were central to many of STAR-TIDES’s approaches.

Golden Phoenix was an annual preparedness exercise conducted in the southern California area which included civil, military and volunteer organization participants. Established in 2006 by then Colonel Steve Ganyard, USMC, when he commanded MAG-46 out of Miramar, the exercise included drills to prepare for natural disasters and terrorist attacks.  Particularly impressive was the extensive degree of collaboration that Golden Phoenix promoted, as well as its year-on-year growth in both the scope and scale of participants and their activities.

The Highlands Forum was begun by the Director of the Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the late Andy Marshall, and led by the late Captain Dick O’Neill. Highlands sponsored a series of meetings from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s among a “global, informal, cross-disciplinary network of experts with a common interest in information, science, and technology and their relevance to global security, societal transformation, and areas of existential risk.”  These sessions provided exceptional insights into evolving trends, key technologies, and emerging global linkages.  One senior official referred to Highlands as “the highest return on investment of anything he did in government.”  Highlands 2.0 recently has been reconstituted and has begun to examine “areas of extreme fragility around the globe.”

The Hexayurt Project led by Mr. Vinay Gupta been the source of many of the innovations in STAR-TIDES over the years, from the eponymous six-sided shelter which has been a feature of nearly all of STAR-TIDES capabilities demos, to the formulation of the “six ways people die” graphic which helped define the components of STAR-TIDES infrastructures.  Vinay’s other ideas have contributed to many aspects of STAR-TIDES’ humanitarian initiatives and civil-military engagements.

TIDES (Transformative Infrastructure for Development and Emergency Support) evolved out of a project called Expedient Infrastructures for Transient Populations (EITP) that was conceived by Mr. James Craft while he was Telecommunications Advisor in Afghanistan.  In September 2007 it was institutionalized at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy (CNSTP) at the National Defense University (NDU).  STAR-TIDES (Sharing to Accelerate Research + TIDES) was established in 2008 to develop a wider network of participants.  Over the next six years, a series of exceptional colleagues evolved TIDES and STAR-TIDES into the baseline structure and capabilities it has today.  These included: Walker Hardy, Lou Elin (Dwyer) Najmi, Amy (Gorman) Steig, Samuel Bendett, Nina Nelly Mobula, Phil Stockdale, David Becker, Paul Bartone, Terry Pudas, and Hans Binnendijk.  Many of their specific efforts are listed on this website’s Projects and References pages.   In 2014-15, when TIDES/STAR-TIDES transitioned away from NDU, TIDES went to the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey as a DoD program while STAR-TIDES moved to George Mason University.