23 Sep 14. Textron Systems Weapon & Sensor Systems announced a pair of successful live-fire demonstrations of its new Fury™ lightweight precision guided glide weapon off of a Shadow® Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The combined Textron Systems Weapon & Sensor Systems and Unmanned Systems team dropped Fury last month from a Shadow 200, engaging and detonating on the target. This marked the first live drop of the Fury and the first live weapon drop from the Unmanned Systems Shadow 200 aircraft configuration. The Textron Systems team, along with partner Thales UK, achieved this milestone within 15 months of initiating work on the small, lightweight weapon system. Fury, equipped on a Shadow aircraft, is on display this week during the 2014 Modern Day Marine exposition at Textron Systems booth 2608. Fury is equipped with a mature and proven warhead. The weapon’s tri-mode fuzing — impact, height of burst and delay — further enables a single Fury to address a broad target set, ranging from static and moving light armored vehicles to small boats and personnel. The precision weapon uses a common interface for rapid integration on multiple manned and unmanned aircraft systems. Fury is guided by a GPS-aided inertial navigation unit system with a Semi-Active Laser Seeker terminal guidance capability. This enables the weapon to engage both stationary and moving targets within 1m accuracy, or fly to specific target coordinates. (Source: Yahoo!/Marketwired)
22 Sep 14. Denel developing course-corrected artillery fuze. Denel Dynamics is conducting proof of concept work on a new, low-cost precision fuze for artillery. The AcuFuze is being developed together with UTC Aerospace Systems in Plymouth in the United Kingdom, combining the former’s guidance and control technologies and the latter’s inertial sensor technologies. The aim is to produce a fuze that has the same intrusion footprint as a standard MIL-STD-333B short-intrusion fuze, and that will give a circular error probable of between 10 and 20 m at all ranges. It is being developed for use with 105 mm and 155 mm artillery and 120 mm mortars, among other weapons, to provide the precision engagement capability often required in today’s operations ‘among the people’ where collateral damage is a serious risk and to reduce the immense demands that artillery makes on the logistic support of forces deployed far from their bases. (Source: IHS Jane’s)
22 Sep 14. US, S Korean sources suggest North has SLBM ambitions. US and South Korean sources have claimed that North Korea is building a tube capable of firing a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), a move that could potentially give Pyongyang a second strike nuclear capability. US officials disclosed to the Washington Free Beacon in late August that “a missile launch tube on a North Korean submarine was recently observed by US intelligence agencies”. On 14 September South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) confirmed that North Korea may be building a SLBM-equipped submarine. In a written response to queries from an opposition lawmaker the MND stated: “There is no intelligence that North Korea has an SLBM in operation. But the possibility of a North Korean submarine equipped with an SLBM has been detected recently.” Neither sources offered any additional details, such as the size of the missile tube or the type of submarine being used by the North Koreans. However the US report cited “two defence officials” as raising concerns about a new “nuclear threat”, which suggests the missile tube may be for a missile large enough to carry a nuclear warhead.
Pyongyang could have exploited two technology sources for a potential “cold-launch” SLBM launch tube. First are the one or more Project 629 ‘Golf’-class conventional missile submarine (SSB) acquired from Russia as scrap in the early 1990s.
While one of these submarines also had a Soviet-era R-27 (SS-N-6 ‘Serb’) SLBM that later