Drones that fly without GPS. Missiles racing off the line. Honeywell’s Matt Milas joins Threat Status from the floor of AFA 2026 to break down the tech keeping the U.S. military ahead.
[TAYLOR] I’m Guy Taylor from Threat Status at The Washington Times. I am on the floor of AFA 2026. I’m very excited because I have one of the smartest people at this conference with me. It’s Matt Milas. He is the head of defense and space for Honeywell Aerospace.
We’re at Honeywell’s display booth here. Matt has agreed to talk to me about how Honeywell… which is one of these companies, it’s a big defense contractor right in the middle of what the future of the U.S. Air Force looks like. One of the big things being talked about here this year, Matt, is the CCA, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft.
Honeywell actually makes the engines for this. Is that right?
[MILAS] Well, we actually provide a lot of different technologies for the CCA, as well as all unmanned systems. One of the primary things is we’re looking at propulsion, what we call our SkyShot 1600, which is a turbofan engine that can provide thrust from 800 pounds of thrust up to 3000 pounds of thrust. So a family of engines that can be used for CCAs.
We also do MMA, which is a mass modular aircraft or MMRA, mass multi-role aircraft. So a lot of different propulsion solutions from the turbofan to turboprops. A lot of our technology that we’ve developed on our commercial dollars has a lot of commercial applications, but also can be made to suit military applications like the CCA.
[TAYLOR] Let’s start just with CCA. One of the big announcements from the U.S. military at this year’s AFA 2026 is that hundreds of CCAs are going to be purchased in the coming years by the Pentagon. Two of the companies leading that are General Atomics and Anduril. Honeywell is actually producing the engines that go inside those models that are competing right now?
[MILAS] Not in those, no. What we’re doing is our SkyShot 1600, we’re actually working with the Air Force to develop what they call Increment 2, which will be the follow-on from the original Increment 1, which will add additional capabilities, additional content that what they want to develop for the mission sets. So the increment one, they were kind of testing out, see how this CCA concept works, and then they’re further refining it.
So there’s a small engine, which the Skyshot 1600 is designed for the smaller applications. And then there’s a mid engine, which our F124 engine, which provides six to 8,000 pounds of thrust. That would be more for the mid-size. So other technologies that we’re providing on the current increment one is navigation and guidance systems to be able to operate in contested and jammed environments. But we offer a whole suite of solutions and technologies from propulsion, navigation, control systems, and actuation, so a whole lot that we do for those.
[TAYLOR] One question about the engine size and thrust. How does the thrust of these smaller engines compare to, say, an F-A-18 fighter jet?
[MILAS] So those are more in the 10,000, 12,000, up to 20,000 pounds of thrust when you get into dual engines. So those have a lot more thrust. They’re a lot bigger, a lot heavier, and a lot more expensive. So the entire purpose of CCAs is something much more affordable, something that’s optionally attritable. Like if you lose it, you’re not going to be as upset about it. So the thing that we’re doing with the engines is trying to make them more affordable, so that if you do lose it, you’re not going to be as worried about it, but also something that’s reliable, something dependable, something that can give you enough range with enough payload so that you want to be able to carry enough missiles or electronic warfare pod or surveillance and reconnaissance capability. You got to carry at a certain distance.
[TAYLOR] What kind of range are we talking about?
[MILAS] Oh, there’s a couple of thousand nautical miles is generally what’s being looked at. So depending on how much you want to carry, that also affects how far you can go.
[TAYLOR] Another thing that Honeywell is right in the middle of is protecting the GPS systems that the U.S. military relies upon in theaters around the world. When we look at the current conflagration with Iran or the conflict in Ukraine or the Indo-Pacific theater in general, this issue of GPS spoofing by U.S. adversaries or GPS jamming, these are different things. What is GPS spoofing and what is Honeywell Aerospace doing?
[MILAS] If you think of like GPS like on your phone, like if you’re driving and you want to go to the grocery store and you plug in, you know, I want to go to the grocery store. If you’re being spoofed, it says, okay, well, the grocery store is way on the other side of town and it takes you the wrong direction. So if you’re getting spoofed, you’re getting told bad directions or bad information.
[TAYLOR] And if we’re talking about a THAAD missile system or a Patriot system…
[MILAS] That would be really bad if a missile is told to go somewhere else, that its target is somewhere else. So spoofing is really bad. It’s also if you’re in a commercial airliner and you’re being told the runway is 10 feet further south, you’re going to be missing or 100 yards, you can have a really bad day. So spoofing is a really critical thing. It can not only affect aircraft, it can affect ships, it can affect land vehicles, anything where you’re dealing with that.
GPS denial or jamming is, you don’t get a GPS signal. So you can’t correct, you don’t know where you’re going. So a lot of the systems that operate for navigation guidance are dependent upon GPS to help feed information and say, here’s where you are, as well as timing. So it tells you — you do position navigation and timing, and if your timing is off you can also be in the wrong spot, the wrong dimension when you need to be there, so that can be very impactful.
[TAYLOR] How do you stop or block spoofing and jamming?
[MILAS] There’s multiple ways of doing that from protective waveforms, or what we’re doing now is called M-code. So we’re changing out the receivers to an M-code receiver, which is the next generation of GPS, which is encrypted and protected so that it’s a lot more difficult for our adversaries to hack into it and change things and alter it. So that’s the first form.
When you get into how we’re operating from a military standpoint, we call it alternative navigation. Things like visual systems. So you can use video cameras to reference. You can use inertial navigation. So knowing where you were and how you’re moving tells you where you’re going to be. Things like atomic clock on a chip for timing so that you’re not dependent upon a GPS signal to give you timing. You can do the timing yourself. And then magnetic navigation. The Earth has a magnetic map. And if you know where you are in the magnetic map, you can change your guidance systems and update your reference values. So a lot of different ways on how you can solve the GPS denial. And we have many of these solutions operating in Ukraine. So we’re seeing what’s actually happening, how to counter that, and how to update the firmware, the software, introduce new systems that can operate. Even star tracking, using celestial navigation and see where you are in relation to the stars can be used to update where you are in relation to that.
[TAYLOR] Futuristic stuff.
Honeywell is also involved in producing guidance systems for U.S. missiles. We’re at this moment where the Pentagon is authorizing billions of dollars to accelerate missile production. We’ve seen reports of significantly depleted missile defense stocks because of the Iran conflict, the Ukraine conflict. How is that whole picture affecting Honeywell’s position in the defense industrial landscape? How do you see this issue of — can the U.S. produce enough missiles, and can Honeywell answer with enough guidance systems as the ramp up happens?
[MILAS] Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve been investing in it since July of last year. We heard the call to action. So we’ve been investing in increasing our capacity for what we do with inertial measurement units or IMUs that go into pretty much every navigation guidance system for the U.S., as well as internationally, we’re able to support them. So we have a lot of capacity that we built up because we’re commercial and we do that on our commercial dollars. So we had already been invested and we’re continuing to invest more as the demand signal is increasing.
We’re actually on or ahead of contract on all of those missile programs that they’re accelerating. We’re working with the Primes, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon or RTX, to accelerate what they’re going to be able to do. So none of those missiles are going to be delayed because of Honeywell parts. We’re going to be ahead of the demand, ahead of the curve. We’re actually increasing capacity to not just serve those needs, but should we need additional missile systems if there are new capabilities that are needed, we’ve got capacity for it.
So it’s a major, major initiative. We feel like we’re well ahead of it. We’re going to continue to invest in it and be able to serve the global market.
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