WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s former acting head of acquisition has joined the California defense and security technology firm Anduril to broaden its international business.
Greg Kausner, who was until last month performing the duties of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, started as head of global defense for Anduril on March 14.
In that position, Kausner will be in charge of reaching out to the governments of U.S. allies and partners to identify their challenges and offer Anduril’s software, engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics, networking, sensors and other technologies to fill capability gaps.
Kausner will also work with the U.S. State and Defense departments to ensure the nations Anduril seeks to do business with are in line “with how the government sees the evolving geopolitical landscape,” and then get those sales cleared, he said in a March 24 interview.
Anduril’s international portfolio is relatively small, though it has contracts with the British Defence Ministry and recently opened an office in Australia.
Kausner previously served as executive director for international cooperation in the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment office. He was also a Navy fighter pilot and served two combat tours in Iraq.
He said he joined Anduril because of its agility, sense of urgency and unconventional ways of doing business — but particularly because of its focus on solving the most pressing national security challenges at an increasingly perilous time.
“We’re in the midst of an increasingly intense rivalry with authoritarian states, competition that’s going to have significant consequences to our way of life, the values that we hold dear and the rules-based international order,” Kausner said. “Central to winning that competition is our ability to harness a new wave of emerging technology; a way that both preserves the global military balance and demonstrates responsible application.”
Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, China’s status as America’s pacing threat and ongoing troubles in the Middle East, among other challenges, underscore the importance of international cooperation between allies and partners, Kausner said.
“Those alliances and partnerships are not things that we can take for granted,” he added.
At some point, Kausner said, interoperability between allied and partner militaries will require more than the same tactics, techniques, procedures and platforms; rather, there will be a need for a fusion of information sharing.
“A truly joint, interchangeable and effective future force is going to utilize common information, empowered by software, fused together in real time,” he explained. “It’s deployed unmanned systems supported by ubiquitous sensors, networked in a meshed environment and enabled by human and machine teaming. That’s the future, in my view.”
Anduril’s core product is Lattice, an operating system that aims to rapidly fuse large amounts of data from sensors and allow “warfighters to collapse kill chains into minutes,” Kausner said.
He declined to comment on the Ukraine conflict, but did say Anduril is talking to the State and Defense departments about how the firm can contribute to broader U.S. and international efforts to support Ukraine and bolster European allies’ security.
Anduril has also produced unmanned aerial systems — some of which are small or autonomous — counter-drone systems, and sensors.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
