No I'm not trying to be clever nor profess to be. I was just mentioning that they talked about the similar thing back in 2000 that was mentioned in the Flightglobal article back then.
In one of my handbooks from Bell Boeing, I been given ( Farnborough in 2000 and 2002 Cierva Lecture where Troy Gaffey gave a presentation and 2004 and 2006 Farnborough) there was artists impression of armed version with laser (?) and armed ASW variant.
I was not on about company sponsored tests, more about what NAVAIR or AFSOC would want.
I'm off to HAI in week and a bit, I'll grab some
PR from there w.r.t and find out more about this.
Cheers