A transport helicopter built by Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky subsidiary to replace the aging Marine One presidential aircraft is on track to achieve inital operational capability next year, National Defense Magazine reported Monday.

The Sikorsky VH-92A twin-engine helicopter is based on the company’s S-92A commercial aircraft and is intended to succeed the fleet of VH-3D Sea King and VH-60N White Hawk presidential helicopters. According to Lockheed, the U.S. Navy plans to acquire 23 VH-92As which will undergo initial operational test and evaluation activities in mid-2020.

Eric Ropella, program manager for the Marine Corps VH-92A effort, told National Defense in an email that the program office is collaborating with other agencies to “ensure continued interoperability” with various communications systems as they evolve.

Sikorsky secured a $1.2B contract to develop Marine One replacement helicopters in 2014. VH-92A passed initial flight assessments last year and entered the low-rate initial production phase in June.

Ellen Lord, defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment and a 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said the Department of Defense will establish an “intellectual property cadre” to develop policies aimed at protecting the U.S. military’s technologies and ensuring data security by October, the Military website reported Monday.

“Acquisition and sustainment is now issuing new functional policies on mission engineering and intellectual property,” Lord said during a briefing at the Pentagon. The new IP protection group “will develop DoD policy within the whole of government effort to address concerns on data rights.”

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2018 required DoD to come up with a group of IP experts within the department and industry to provide guidance on how to apply regulations to procurement strategy, according to the report.

Army leaders signed a charter to establish a cyberspace effects position for civilian personnel, Fifth Domain reported Monday.

“This is really a big deal. What this allows us to do, essentially, [is establish] a formal framework and program that will allow us to recruit, develop, retain those members of our workforce that are specifically conducting cyberspace effects,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, head of Army Cyber Command, said during a signing ceremony on Aug. 20 at TechNet Augusta.

Under Career Program 71, the new cyber warfare positions will offer a centralized approach to civilian education, training and professional development and will be aligned to a corresponding position for uniformed personnel. The report said civilian personnel will work on the service’s cyber mission force teams and carry out defensive and offensive cyberspace missions.

U.S. Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, has identified “persistent engagement” as a key element in his leadership of the agency, NPR reported Monday.

“That’s the idea of persistent engagement. This idea of enabling and acting,” he said. Nakasone, who assumed leadership of NSA in May 2018, has taken an aggressive stance on the agency’s efforts to address threats from adversaries such as China, North Korea, Russia and Iran.

As part of his leadership strategy, Nakasone selected Anne Neuberger to head the Cybersecurity Directorate. The directorate, which is meant to consolidate the agency’s offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, is slated to launch in October.

“We are a surveillance agency in a democracy,” she said. “The risk of losing public understanding of what we’re doing, public trust and who we are as an organization is something that has to be forefront in our mind.”

Neuberger’s comments come after the agency recommended the termination of a government surveillance program under the 2015 USA Freedom Act in April. Other challenges cited by NSA officials include retaining talent despite making large hiring efforts.

A division within the National Institutes of Health has issued and renewed awards to fund three new and eight existing research efforts on biomedicine. NIH said Friday that its National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities provided the funds under the Research Centers in Minority Institutions program to support biomedical research efforts in underrepresented communities.

The program also seeks to bolster the biomedical research field’s infrastructure, address health imbalances across multiple disciplines and diversify the biomedical workforce. The agency will provide a total of $187M across five-years to support 11 projects concerning different issues on health disparity. 

The award recipients are:

• Accelerating Excellence in Translational Science
• Border Biomedical Research Center
• Center for Translational Research in Health Disparities
• Enhancement of Cancer Research at Clark Atlanta University
• FAMU Center for Health Disparities Research
• Health Disparities Research at University of California, Riverside
• Howard University Research Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities
• PHSU Specialized Center in Health Disparities
• RCMI at Morgan State University: Center for Urban Health Disparities Research and Innovation
• San Diego State University HealthLINK Center for Translational Health Disparities Research
• Xavier RCMI Center for Cancer Research

The U.S. Army is working to boost the capacity of its ground-based precision navigation and timing technologies to address spoofing threats, or when signals are disrupted to produce inaccurate information. The service branch said Thursday that its current PNT technologies are still prone to spoofing issues caused by various factors such as weather, terrain or near-peer adversaries.

Col. Nick Kioutas, the Army’s PNT project manager, said the branch has adopted a layered approach to boost the accuracy on position and timing data, with the integration of inertial-based navigation systems, odometers and other non-radio frequency tools.

“Our systems will integrate all these data sources to determine which one we can trust the most,” Kioutas said. 

The Army also plans to gain access to more PNT data sources via external networks of the global positioning system. The service branch is also working on a new Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool in addition to PNT efforts. The tool would work to facilitate the control and management of EW assets supporting land missions.