Kratos Defense profile

Kratos Defense gives investors exposure to higher-end unmanned aircraft inside a broader defense-technology business.

What Kratos Defense does

Kratos Defense sells jet-powered unmanned aircraft — the Valkyrie line and a long-running target-drone business — alongside defense electronics, jet-engine development, and services work. The structural point investors miss is that target drones and combat-representative aircraft are a recurring consumables business tied to training and test ranges, while the collaborative-combat-aircraft concept is developmental: it can absorb spending for years before it produces meaningful production revenue. The services and electronics work is what funds the company through that gap, which is why the drone narrative and the financial reality can diverge for extended periods.

The product lines that define the company for research purposes:

• Valkyrie jet-powered unmanned aircraft
• Target drones for training and test ranges
• Tactical unmanned systems
• GEK800 turbofan engine (developed with GE Aerospace)
• Defense electronics and services

This profile is qualitative by design. It carries no share price, no price target, no valuation multiple, and no rating — those change faster than any page can honestly track, and the filings linked below are the authoritative source for them.

Kratos Defense drone lineup

Kratos has both complete aircraft and a large target-drone, avionics, and range-systems business. This inventory keeps air vehicles separate from subsystems.

Statuses are editorial classifications from the company’s current public catalog: active means currently presented for sale, delivery, or program work; development means publicly disclosed but not a mature production offering; legacy means retained for historical or installed-fleet coverage.

Recent contracts & awards

A dated log of the specific contracts, orders, funding, and deployments reported for Kratos Defense, each tied to its primary source. This is a record of what was announced — a "selection", "award", or "partnership" is not the same as obligated money, so read each source before treating a figure as revenue. No figure appears here unless a source reported it.

• ContractSep 1, 2026$20M+
  Kratos Wins More Than $20 Million Contract for Mobile SATCOM Gateways in Asia

  Kratos won a contract worth more than $20 million to supply a mobile satellite-communications gateway system to a defense organization in the Asia-Pacific region, undisclosed for security reasons. The system pairs truck-mounted Trifold transportable antennas with shelter-based baseband platforms, Kratos' Compass software for controlling and monitoring the network, and its Monics software for watching the radio spectrum and flagging jamming or interference. It targets customers who need communications that keep working when fixed SATCOM infrastructure is contested or targeted. No delivery schedule was disclosed. KTOS shares fell 3.2% on the announcement, continuing a pattern in which several recent positive Kratos contract announcements have drawn a negative next-day stock reaction.

  StockTitan: Kratos wins $20 million contract to deliver mobile SATCOM gateways
• ContractAug 31, 2026$35M
  Kratos' C5ISR division wins roughly $35 million military-grade hardware production award

  Kratos' Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) division received a production award reported at approximately $35 million for military-grade hardware described as intended for direct support of the warfighter in the field. The company said no further detail on the customer or program would be released, citing national-security and customer confidentiality, so the award should be tracked as a C5ISR-segment data point rather than attributed to a named platform until a primary Department of War contract record or a Kratos filing names one.

  StockTitan: Kratos receives $35 million national security-related military-grade hardware production award
• ContractAug 17, 2026
  GEK800 turbofan (Kratos / GE Aerospace) reported to receive U.S. military F143 type designation, tied to a JASSM-family missile contract

  Trade press reported the GEK800 engine, co-developed by Kratos and GE Aerospace, won a contract connected to the JASSM missile family and received the U.S. military's F143 type designation. No primary DoD or company release was available at the time of this entry to confirm contract value or scope; verify against war.gov contract announcements or the companies' own newsrooms before citing a figure.

  StockTitan — Kratos GEK800 Wins JASSM Contract, Gets F143 Designation

Where Kratos Defense sits in the value chain

Kratos Defense is a defense contractor whose unmanned work sits inside a wider defense portfolio, so drone headlines are only one input into results and can be offset — in both directions — by unrelated segments.

Its disclosed activity spans aerial drones, ground robotics. That placement is the single most useful thing to fix in your head before reading any coverage, because the same headline means different things at different layers: a large platform award is transformative for a pure-play, material but diluted for a diversified contractor, and only indirectly relevant to a component supplier whose exposure arrives later as build-rate demand. Retail coverage routinely applies one story to all three layers at once. For the layer-by-layer comparison across the sector, see the drone stocks research shortlist and the list of publicly traded drone companies.

What to watch

The signals worth tracking are structural, not price-based — they tell you whether the business is changing shape, which is what eventually shows up in the numbers.

• The split between development-phase unmanned work and production or recurring work, because the two carry very different margin and durability profiles.
• Cost-plus versus fixed-price mix disclosed in the filings — fixed-price development on a novel airframe is where defense contractors most often take losses.
• Whether new unmanned awards are prototype agreements or production contracts, since prototype vehicles frequently do not transition.
• How much of the reported growth comes from segments unrelated to unmanned aircraft, which determines how much of the ticker is actually a drone play.
• Whether target-vehicle test-support work — like flight tests run jointly with allied missile-defense agencies — is a one-off range booking or a repeating cadence, because that distinction determines how durable that revenue line is versus how much it just bumps a given quarter.
• Whether a reported U.S. Air Force interest in next-generation target drones that better emulate stealth aircraft signatures turns into a funded requirement naming Kratos specifically, or stays a service-wide capability discussion; Kratos is the incumbent target-drone supplier this site already tracks, but an incumbency position is not the same claim as a named award.
• The GEK800 turbofan, developed with GE Aerospace and reported to have received a U.S. military type designation (F143) tied to a JASSM-family missile program, as a second engine-development revenue line distinct from the airframe business; watch whether it is disclosed as a Kratos-segment item or folded into the GE Aerospace side of the partnership.
• Sell-side commentary periodically frames Kratos as sitting on a large multi-billion-dollar "opportunity pipeline" across next-generation unmanned and missile-defense systems. Treat a pipeline estimate like that as an analyst's addressable-market framing, not a disclosed backlog number: the two words get used almost interchangeably in headlines, and only backlog is a figure the company itself reports in its filings.

How to research Kratos Defense

Every question below has one authoritative source, and using the wrong source is how most retail research goes wrong.

• The segment reporting in the annual filing on SEC EDGAR is where you establish how much of the business is unmanned systems versus everything else.
• Search the DoD contract announcements for the awarding command and contract type; the announcement language distinguishes an indefinite-delivery vehicle from a funded order.
• Kratos-built target vehicles are periodically used to support allied joint missile-defense flight tests — for example, target-vehicle support for a joint U.S.–Japan Aegis flight-test event in 2026 — which is range-support revenue, not a program-of-record aircraft sale; check the company site and SEC filings for whether test-support awards are itemized separately from the Valkyrie and tactical-UAS lines before treating a single test event as evidence of platform demand.
• For developmental air vehicles, DARPA program pages describe what a given effort is actually trying to prove, which is the honest way to judge whether a demonstration matters.
• Program descriptions on the company site identify which systems are fielded versus which are company-funded demonstrators.
• A trade-press report on an Air Force interest in target drones that can better mimic stealth-aircraft radar signatures did not name a specific awardee at the time of this entry; check DoD contract announcements and Kratos's own newsroom before attributing a specific program to Kratos rather than the wider target-drone supplier base.

One failure mode is worth naming explicitly: a company announcement describing a "selection", "award", or "partnership" is not the same as obligated money, and the two are easy to conflate because they use the same vocabulary. Check the filing before treating either as revenue. Our full approach is documented on the methodology page.

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