NeuralStar delivers for the JNMS
Bridging network management across the military services

In the post-9/11 world, the U.S. military fights its battles differently. Today, forces in Iraq or
Afghanistan are led by a Joint Task Force (JTF) commander who could come from any of the
services, and who leads units chosen from across the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Special Forces to match the unique needs of the current campaign.

And while that delivers warfighting advantages, it presents demanding technological challenges. Those challenges aren’t unique, however. They are familiar to business, government agencies and other organizations attempting to bridge multiple interconnected networks—each with its own technologies, management teams, operational policies—in order to support collaboration between different departments, locations, partners and services.

Put more simply: How do you manage net-centered organizations composed of multiple networks?

Suppose an Army network manager at Fort Benning, for example, administers the base’s
communications infrastructure using certain processes, following certain policies, employing
certain visualization and response structures. That’s all part of the Concept of Operations
(ConOps) for the network he manages. When those network resources are called up to support
a JTF mission, it means working with systems from other services under a different ConOps. The
Joint Network Management System (JNMS) is the DoD’s program for bringing coherent management across these different, heterogeneous resources when they are tapped for JTF operations, and NeuralStar is the management core of JNMS.

For JNMS, and for units that support JTF missions, NeuralStar delivers:

• Enhanced situational awareness for joint military commands. NeuralStar enables commanders to redeploy and manage network resources in a tactical environment,
  improve utilization of scarce spectrum resources and integrate security with performance and availability management across teams who are used to working with divergent processes, policies, tools and visualization schemes.
• Consolidated, real-time operational views across a wide variety of information and
  telecom technologies, including network discovery across tiered and interconnected networks.
• Reconciliation to the “planned network", as well as integration to the help desk for
  problem management and trouble ticketing, and integration to a variety of third-party applications, such as Element Management Systems.

The JNMS doesn’t have a true ConOps, instead it specifies loosely
defined parameters to accommodate its broad scope and users. The program defines a set of processes and visualization tools using NeuralStar that are “JTF-locked.” For example, standard JTF deployments call for supporting a specific portfolio devices with JTF-specific configurations, even though NeuralStar can support any device and offers an easy-to-use development environment for customizing drivers and processes. And since visualizations are designed to provide a “least common denominator” for multi-unit forces, JNMS only uses a handful of NeuralStar’s customization features. What JTF specs lack in “pushing the envelope” they make up for by helping managers work across unfamiliar, heterogeneous infrastructures toward a common goal.

There are other ways NeuralStar has been customized for JNMS. For example, JNMS provides much more than just network management. Its 40+ components also provide capabilities for high-level communications planning, detailed planning and engineering, spectrum planning, security and more. As the network management service within JNMS, NeuralStar has been customized so well to meet JNMS’s specs that you hardly notice it as part of the overall system. In fact, when one Air Force colonel who manages an enterprise network first saw NeuralStar standing-alone and was told that it was the management core of JNMS he exclaimed, “I’ve seen JNMS, and that’s not JNMS.”

Here are some other ways NeuralStar has been made JNMS-specific:

Learn More about NeuralStar Solutions for the Department of Defense