When President Bush sent the USNS Comfort hospital ship to 12 nations in the Caribbean and Central / South America as part of the “Partnership for the Americas” initiative, numerous research opportunities for NPS were created.

The Hastily Formed Networks (HFN) research group focuses on the social and technical aspects of human networks that form during collaborative Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Relief (HA/DR) efforts where the U.S. Military is involved. Typically, the human networks that form in response to large-scale, urgent HA/DR are established rapidly and are comprised of people that (in most cases) have never worked together before. To be effective, they must share a common “conversation space” where they can plan and execute the mission. These are the basic elements of HFN, which is a term that was coined at the Naval Postgraduate School by Dr. Peter Denning and other collaborators in 2005. Dr. Denning is the Director of the Cebrowski Institute for Information Innovation and Superiority.

The Comfort mission provided medical treatment and training to 12 nations over a 120-day period. In each country, the HA team spent approximately one week providing services both aboard the ship and at 3-4 ad hoc medical treatments facilities located in remote villages.

Coordinating and executing HA at the remote villages is where HFN effectiveness is challenged. Lack of resources such as power and communications, compounded with the additional logistical challenges of moving into and out of austere environments, provided researchers from NPS with a significant amount of research topics.

The mission was sponsored by OASD (NII) to study the effectiveness of various Collaborative IT Tools in supporting HA where the U.S. Military is involved. U.S. Military collaboration with International Organizations (IO) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) in stability operations such as HA is directed by Department of Defense Directive 3000.05. This directive provides more impetus to the research efforts of the Cebrowski HFN group.

Collaboration near the Civil-Military boundary provided many challenges because often there were major differences in the way these organizations operated. Also, some NGO may intentionally avoid involvement with the military in order to maintain a certain public image of their mission and methods.

Providing a communication backbone from remote villages that lack organic power and communications was another focus of the research. Use and effectiveness of satellite and wireless terrestrial communications was examined. Brian Steckler, Director of the NPS research effort and an active participant in the Comfort mission said, “These remote villages provided an excellent simulation of a major disaster area to the extent that power and comms were largely absent.” Brian Steckler is a veteran researcher of HA/DR, having conducted operations on location in Thailand (post-tsunami) and Mississippi (post-Katrina).

The Cebrowski HFN group sent four rotations of students and faculty to the Comfort. Given the inter-disciplinary nature of HFN, the Comfort research project was supported by personnel from many different curricula across the NPS campus.

A case study document has been completed on the mission. Written by Brian Steckler and Scott McKenzie, it is entitled, Hastily Formed Network Case Study: USNS Comfort (T-AH20) Humanitarian Outreach Mission to the Caribbean and Central/South America (Summer 2007).