KBR Inc.

KBR's roots run back further than its defense reputation suggests. The M.W. Kellogg Company was designing oil refineries and pipe systems in New York starting in 1901, and Brown & Root was pouring concrete in Texas from 1919. Halliburton combined the two engineering houses into Kellogg Brown & Root in 1998, then spun the combined company off as an independent public company, KBR Inc., in a 2006 IPO. It has traded on the New York Stock Exchange as KBR ever since. The company now runs on two segments that share almost nothing in common except an engineering pedigree.

Mission Technology Solutions, renamed from Government Solutions in a 2024 realignment, is the defense and space side. It supports NASA human spaceflight and science programs, including work at Johnson Space Center dating back to the Apollo era, systems engineering at Goddard Space Flight Center, and astronaut health and performance contracts. On the military side it runs research and advanced prototyping, systems engineering and integration, cyber analytics, space domain awareness, test and evaluation, and command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance work for the Pentagon, the intelligence community, the UK Ministry of Defence, and the Australian Defence Force. It also carries KBR's long history in logistics support, dating to the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program contracts that supported US forces in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq through the 1990s and 2000s, and now runs newer named lines like National Security Solutions, Readiness and Sustainment Solutions, and a supporting role in the US Golden Dome missile defense initiative. Sustainable Technology Solutions is the commercial and industrial half.

It licenses proprietary process technology, mostly chemistries developed decades ago under the Kellogg name, for ammonia, methanol, ethylene, and refining plants, and does engineering, procurement, and project delivery work for energy transition projects including hydrogen, carbon capture, and sustainable fuels. It is a smaller, steadier counterweight to the more headline-grabbing defense and space business, and it is what keeps KBR from reading as a pure government contractor even though defense work still supplies most of its revenue. Beyond its two reporting segments, KBR's history includes some of the more visible names in postwar reconstruction and disaster response work, from Gulf Coast recovery after Hurricane Katrina to base construction and support at Guantanamo Bay. The company has leaned harder into the defense and space side over the past decade through targeted technical acquisitions, positioning Mission Technology Solutions as an engineering and integration partner rather than just a logistics contractor. With close to 38,000 employees worldwide and clients in more than 30 countries, KBR now describes itself less as a construction firm and more as a science, technology, and engineering company that happens to still run some of the government's largest sustainment contracts.