AUSA: Applied Aerospace and Defense President + CSO Chris Rogers

Chris Rodgers joins us now here on the ground at AUSA 2026 in Washington D. C. He is the president and chief strategy officer at Applied Aerospace and Defense. Chris, really nice to see you. Thanks for chatting with us today.

Thanks for making some time.

Of course. I want to get your gauge about the things that you're hearing from customers here on the ground at AUSA this year, specifically about replenishing existing systems while at the same time trying to actively develop new ones.

Yeah, two two themes here, but also two themes probably top of mind throughout applied. Uh one is ramp. So we're supporting a wide range of strike programs and other high priority programs for the army. So a lot of our focus is how do we go from 100 to 200, 300. The other theme really ties into next gen. So we're enabling a lot of programs that are not existing programs, but they're going to be rolled out here in coming years. And how do we partner with customers kind of from prototype stage all the way through production to kind of get those up and running.

So that's exactly where I want to go to next. What does it actually take to turn a successful prototype into effective large scale production?

I mean, our philosophy at applied is is partnership. And so we are not transactional. We try to get involved, do our very best work when our engineers are involved really at the design stage. And so well past the point where uh something is a prototype, we're thinking about how are you actually going to manufacture and manufacture at scale. So uh what that requires is yes capacity, but it also involves a lot of around material science, uh deep relationships with the supply chain, a lot of the know-how that allows you again to go from one or two to ultimately make it hundreds of something.

And you do lots of work of course with both established defense giants as well as newer entrance into the broader conversation. What makes applied so valuable to both?

We uh each of those customers brings something like very unique and so Lockheed Martin does fantastic things that no other customer can do. On the same notes, a new entrant like Andre has some incredibly unique capabilities. Uh so we find working with customers like that for us, it's a way to like exercise uh different muscle groups. So you know, not just similar to a cross-trained athlete, a lot of the work you do for uh a customer like Lucky makes you that much better for when you're when you're working with the customer like Andrew and vice versa.

Take us behind the scenes a little bit. How do you go about actively making the decisions to decide where to invest and how to expand production?

We uh we spend a lot of time as a team focused on where's the demand going? Uh when you look at kind of funded programs, uh when you go up to kind of budgets, but even beyond that in terms of what are some of the mission needs. Those are a lot of the things that kind of shape where we're dedicating our capacity and that's frankly one of the top things that as a team we're focused on right now is when you've got over a billion one of backlog, we've got a tremendous amount of forward visibility in 27, but a lot of what we're focused on is what types of programs are going to be hyper relevant when you get into 28, 29 and beyond. So it's a lot of those things that kind of shape our thinking.

Talk to me a bit more about what it takes to shape your thinking, what long-term defense needs and long-term space needs are actively shaping your strategy.

So part of what uh we think is pretty powerful about our model is we're strategically focused, so we're in space and also defense. Uh but then within that we're very diversified. So 150 different platforms. And then within our three market areas, space launch, defense aviation, airborne systems, advanced sensing, precision strike. Each one of those has areas that are production programs, but then to your question, a lot of them are also what's next. So when we think about space, uh tremendous work with uh large commercial customers like a SpaceX or Blue Origin. A lot of what's next also ties into payloads. So we're doing some very unique work uh for programs that have national security implications on the satellite side, spacecraft. When you look at defense aviation, um what's next for us even though it might not sound like next gen is about 25% of our business is aftermarket. So a lot of this is sustaining uh some of the proven rotor wing platforms that are going to be flying for a long time. But then also like what's next? So we're doing some pretty unique work on CCA, programs for the army like MD 75 that are top priority. And then precision strike, there's a tremendous amount of uh the programs that are ramping already, but then also a lot of the new ones get us pretty excited. Some of these low cost interceptors and working with some of the uh new entrance to the market.

Sounds like a lot of great growth opportunities coming up. Chris Rogers, thanks for chatting with me. Nice to see you here.

Thanks again.