US defence start-up Anduril plans to develop a new family of long-range precision munitions designed for rapid and high-rate production at a fraction the cost of current weapons systems.
Called Barracuda, the new line of cruise missiles will come in a range of sizes and capabilities that can be paired with various existing aircraft, including fifth-generation fighters. Anduril on 12 September said it is currently flight testing three Barracuda variants powered by air-breathing turbojet engines.
What distinguishes Barracuda from existing munition types is Anduril’s focus on design simplicity and ease of assembly, which the company says will allow it to churn out Barracudas at rates vastly exceeding current weapon production.
“Our belief is that we need about 10 times the number of weapons that we currently have in order to be relevant [and] establish deterrence,” says Chris Brose, chief strategy officer at Anduril.
War games conducted in recent years indicate the USA and allies would burn through existing stocks of precision munitions in the opening weeks of a high-intensity conflict. Executives at weapons manufacturers, including Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, have also highlighted limitations to their production capacity.
Some of the most-critical weapon systems, such as Lockheed’s ship-killing LRASM or Raytheon’s venerable AMRAAM air-to-air missile, can still only be churned out at a rate of around 1,000 units annually.
Although manufacturers have moved to expand munitions production in recent years, doing so requires significant financial investment and years of work – commitments companies are reluctant to make without purchase guarantees from the Pentagon.
“These systems… [are] all but impossible to really produce in the volumes that our operational leaders are saying they’re going to need,” Brose says. The design of traditional munitions make them “incredibly hard to produce”, requiring highly-specialised labour and supply chains, and complex manual assembly procedures.
With Barracuda, Anduril seeks to address both cost and production challenges, aiming to achieve “hyper-scale production” volumes and unit costs as low as 30% of comparable systems. The munitions will be as simple as possible, and more-efficient manufacturing techniques will allow for rapid assembly, it says
“You have to design something that is producible,” says Diem Salmon, Anduril’s vice-president of air dominance and strike. “A lot of that is keeping it simple.”
Use of fewer subcomponents and commercially available parts, and not requiring unique and highly specialised hand tools, are pillars Anduril is incorporating into the Barracuda programme.
“If you do not solve this at the level of design, there is no chance that you’re going to be able to make it up at rate manufacturing,” Brose says.
Promotional materials released by the company claim Barracuda will use 50% fewer parts, 95% fewer tools and require 50% less time to produce, without citing a specific comparison benchmark.
Anduril is currently flight testing three Barracuda variants. Those include the mid-size Barracuda-250, which boasts a range of at least 200nm (3700km) and is designed to fit inside Lockheed Martin F-35 weapons bays and on the hard points of fourth-generation fighters, including the Boeing F-15E, Lockheed Martin F-16 and F/A-18E/F.
The smaller Barracuda-100 is intended to be launched from attack helicopters with a range of 85nm or fired from the ground.
The larger Barracuda-500 is oriented toward air launches from cargo aircraft, including the Lockheed Martin C-130 and Boeing C-17 Globemaster III jet, in addition to fighters. The US Air Force (USAF) has been experimenting with launching palletised cruise missiles from transports the C-130, with the goal of diversifying options for delivering lethal strikes. It boasts a range of 500nm or more.
Anduril has not yet lumped Barracuda into a specific weapons category, instead calling it an “autonomous air vehicle”, rather than an air-to-air, air-to-ground or anti-ship missile.
The company, which incorporates proprietary autonomy software called Lattice into its increasingly diverse portfolio of defence products, also suggests Barracudas could evolve for use as ”swarmable” UAV capable of conducting more-complex missions than point-to-point strikes.
Anduril confirms Barracuda forms the basis of its bid to develop a low-cost cruise missile under the USAF’s Enterprise Test Vehicle Franklin programme, nicknamed ”Franklin”.
Brose says the design is “very much in the mix” for other undisclosed programmes, and that Anduril is discussing sales with non-US customers.
Barracuda expands Anduril’s munitions portfolio, which the company lunched in 2023 with Roadrunner, a twinjet drone-interceptor capable of landing vertically and being refuelled. That system is meant to be a low-cost means of targetting swarms of one-way UAVs fired against Ukrainian cities by Russia.
Anduril is also a finalist for the USAF’s first tranche of uncrewed autonomous jets, which are meant to be a low-cost supplement to conventional fighter aircraft. That offer is believed to be based on the company’s Fury design, acquired from Blue Force Technologies in 2023.
