Kratos
KTOS · NASDAQ · Industrials · Defense · Unmanned Systems & Attritable Drones
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Red Cardinal Snapshot
WHAT IT DOES
Kratos builds low-cost jet-powered drones — target drones that missiles are tested against, attritable combat drones like the XQ-58 Valkyrie, and the small, cheap jet engines that power this entire class of aircraft — plus hypersonic flight-test vehicles and microwave electronics.
HOW IT MAKES MONEY
Government contracts, mostly with the US military. The steady base is unglamorous: every missile test needs something realistic to shoot at, and Kratos supplies the targets. On top of that sit development programs for combat drones, engines, and hypersonic testbeds that pay modestly today and are bets on production tomorrow.
WHY WE TRACK IT
The defense system's central lesson from Ukraine is that magazines win wars — cheap things in quantity beat exquisite things in scarcity. Kratos is the company most purely organized around that idea, and its engine business sits on the industry's tightest bottleneck: nobody makes enough small, cheap jet engines for the low-cost cruise missiles and drones everyone now wants.
THE SIMPLE THESIS
An F-35 is a masterpiece you cannot afford to lose. Kratos builds the opposite: aircraft cheap enough to send where you would never send a pilot, and the engines that make cheapness possible. If the future of air war is quantity, Kratos is the affordability argument turned into a company — though the marquee combat-drone contracts have so far gone to others.
PREMIUM RESEARCH
The rest of the Kratos dossier
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