Kratos Defense & Security Solutions

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions started life in 1994 as a wireless infrastructure company called Wireless Facilities Incorporated, a business with nothing to do with defense. It renamed itself Kratos in 2007 after a series of acquisitions pivoted it toward national security work, most importantly the 2011 merger with Integral Systems, which brought satellite ground systems and space communications expertise into the company. It trades on Nasdaq as KTOS and has become one of the more closely watched mid-sized names in defense electronics because of its bet on low-cost, attritable systems. The company's most visible line is unmanned aircraft, reported as its own segment. Kratos builds the BQM-167 and other aerial target drones used by the US military to test air defense systems against realistic threats, and it developed the XQ-58 Valkyrie, an early entrant in the Air Force's push toward loyal-wingman-style uncrewed combat aircraft designed to fly alongside piloted fighters at a fraction of their cost.

That target-drone heritage, building aircraft meant to be cheap enough to lose, is what positioned Kratos early for the Pentagon's more recent interest in attritable and expendable unmanned systems. The rest of the business sits inside Kratos Government Solutions, an umbrella over several distinct technical lines. Its microwave electronics group makes radio frequency and microwave components used across radar, electronic warfare, and satellite communications systems. Its space, satellite, and cyber group, built substantially on the old Integral Systems and RT Logic businesses, supplies satellite ground control software and systems used by the Space Force, NASA, and commercial satellite operators, along with space domain awareness and cybersecurity services. A training and simulation line, built up through acquisitions like TDI, supports mission readiness training for the military.

Kratos also runs a turbine technologies group, developing small jet engines including the TDI-J85 that power some of its own drones and other expendable systems, and a defense and rocket support services line that includes propulsion, hypersonics-related work, and rocket program support for government customers. Kratos has leaned hard into messaging around affordable mass, the idea that cheaper, more numerous systems matter as much as exquisite, expensive ones in a future conflict, and its acquisition pattern over the past two decades, more than a dozen deals since the mid-2000s, has been aimed squarely at building out that thesis across drones, engines, and electronics rather than any single flagship platform. With about 3,600 employees, it is a fraction of the size of the primes it increasingly supplies and sometimes competes against, but its niche in expendable and semi-expendable systems has made it a frequent subject of Pentagon rapid-prototyping interest.