Anduril touts new, easy-to-build cruise missiles

Can Anduril Industries really produce a cruise missile faster and for one-third less money? 

Company officials say their new Barracuda line of air-breathing missiles will cost 30 percent less than comparable weapons and are designed to address the Pentagon’s relatively recent realization that it cannot rearm fast enough for a sustained conflict.

Exquisite weapons are “all but impossible to really produce in the volumes that our operational leaders are saying they’re going to need, which is like a 10x increase in weapons production. What we had sought to do with Barracuda is solve that problem at the level of design, to build a system that is simple, that is easy to manufacture, that is software-defined and mass-producible,” Chris Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, told reporters Wednesday.  

Anduril’s cruise missile will come in three versions, ranging in payload and size: Barracuda-100, Barracuda-250, and Barracuda-500. Brose said they will include autonomy software to enable the weapons to team with crewed and uncrewed platforms.  

All three variants are “flying now,” said Diem Salmon, Anduril’s VP of air dominance and strike. The Barracuda 500 variant is one of the contenders in a Defense Innovation Unit and Air Force program to develop an “enterprise test vehicle,” Salmon said, which will be a one-way UAV that can be produced en masse and relatively cheaply. 

Salmon did not say who is building the engines to power these cruise missiles, but noted that all three variants will have air-breathing engines and will vary in size and vendor. 

Anduril plans to lower costs by using commercial components and making the weapon as simple as possible to produce and assemble, Brose said.

“Every variant of Barracuda leverages core subsystems, which are reusable across the family of systems. These are systems that can be assembled with tools, literally that you probably have in your garage–screwdrivers, pliers, things of that sort—so it is not gated in terms of its producibility on highly specialized tooling, highly specialized manufacturing processes, highly specialized labor, none of which we’re ever going to have enough of,” Brose said. 

The company recently announced its plans to build a large factory called “Arsenal” to scale up its production of weapons and drones, like the Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft—a program Anduril is in the running to build. 

There isn’t yet a clear demand signal from U.S. and international customers to direct Anduril’s Barracuda output, Brose said, but they’re investing “ahead of need.” 

“We will be able to ramp production of Barracuda as needed between now and when Arsenal comes online, but we are very much envisioning this as a capability that would go into Arsenal and then really take advantage of the massive scale for production that would be available in that facility,” he said. 

Anduril was founded in 2017 to bring a tech-company approach to Pentagon acquisition, and is known for its autonomy and unmanned and anti-drone systems.