Boeing Company Exclusive: 3 Critical Projects for the Navy

The Navy League's Sea-Air-Space Exposition happens every year near Washington, D.C. It's the largest Navy-oriented show in the world, and every major defense contractor is there to press the flesh and show off its wares.

Boeing is a big player, of course, and investors should be paying close attention to the defense giant's products. Boeing's "Defense, space & security" security division accounts for roughly 40% of its revenue and about half of operating profit.

I was able to talk with Boeing's Matt Moffit at the Sea-Air-Space expo, and he gave me a great rundown on the company's Navy products. The three he highlighted are the EA-18 Growler, the P-8 Poseidon, and the UCLASS program. You can see it all in the video below.

Video transcript:

Matt Moffit is vice president of Navy Systems at Boeing, and is well-qualified for the job. The retired rear admiral and highly decorated combat veteran brought 34 years of Navy experience with him when he joined the company in 2008, and has piloted several different aircraft.

When I asked him to talk about Boeing's big products at the Sea-Air-Space expo, he singled out three, starting with the EA-18 Growler, which is the electronic warfare version of the Super Hornet.

Very capable, broadband capability that is unsurpassed in the world. It is really the only airborne electronic attack aircraft at the tactical level. And the Navy provides that capability to both the joint world and the coalition world. Whenever they go into harm's way, Growlers and their predecessor, the Prowler, are there to serve the war fighters. Big program... big for the future as things get a little more complicated out there in the war-fighting world with the electromagnetic spectrum and access to it. And that plays into the stealth world also.

Next, Moffit talked about the Boeing P-8 Poseidon. It's mostly known for antisubmarine warfare, but is used by the U.S. military for various other purposes.

I'm pretty sure you've seen that on the news lately with the unfortunate tragedy with the Malaysian airliner. The P-8's that were deployed over in Kadena, Japan, were redeployed, relocated down to Australia and were part of that search process down there. VP-16, the Navy squadron that has their maiden deployment, is out there doing some really good work. Primarily for anti-submarine warfare, but specifically in this case for surveillance, and of course looking for debris and possible evidence of where that aircraft might have gone.

And finally, there's UCLASS, which stands for the Navy's Unmanned Carrier Launched Surveillance and Strike program. Yes, we're talking drones launched off of aircraft carriers.

Other programs, of course the portfolio in the Navy system is 60 programs, so we span basically from the seabed to outer space. Satellites, underwater vehicles, unmanned vehicles. We have a program called U-Class that we're working with the Navy on, it's going to be a Navy program of record. It's an unmanned aircraft off a carrier. You've probably recently heard about other aircraft off carrier, well, this one is the dedicated program that's going to provide ISR capability -- that's intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance -- for the battle group and also for the larger picture the theater commander and also the AOR commander. So, those three programs are probably our biggest programs right now.

There are other big Boeing products of course, including the Osprey and Super Hornet -- and we'll have more about those in our next video.

Reporting from the Sea-Air-Space Expo near Washington, D.C., I'm Motley Fool analyst Rex Moore.