Summary and Key Points: Anduril Industries has unveiled its new Barracuda family of cruise missiles, designed to address the U.S. military’s cruise missile shortage. With three variants—Barracuda-M 100, 250, and 500—the missiles offer advanced capabilities at lower costs, thanks to Anduril’s “hyper-scale production” approach.

-The Barracuda family is expected to provide the U.S. with a high-volume, affordable alternative to existing missiles like the AGM-158, crucial for long-term conflicts.

-Anduril’s scalable production and simplified assembly could revolutionize cruise missile manufacturing, offering a quick-response solution for large-scale conflicts, especially in the Pacific theater against potential adversaries like China.

How Anduril’s Barracuda Could Help U.S. Stockpile Affordable Cruise Missiles

Last week, California-based Anduril Instrustries unveiled their new Barracuda family of cruise missiles which are meant to address one of America’s most pressing strategic shortcomings: its inability to produce munitions in sufficient numbers to sustain a large-scale conflict in the 21st century.

These new weapons could feasibly be described as one-way drones or air-breathing cruise missiles. They come in three variations depending on the range and payload required for the job, with the largest and most capable iteration meant to serve in a similar role to Lockheed Martin’s AGM-158 family of low-observable cruise missiles – including in cargo aircraft via the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Rapid Dragon palletized launch system.

The real claim to fame for the Barracuda family is Anduril’s ability to mass-produce these missiles for low cost and rapidly expand production to meet the military’s needs using a methodology the company calls “hyper-scale production.”

“A single Barracuda takes 50 percent less time to produce, requires 95 percent fewer tools, and 50 percent fewer parts than competing solutions on the market today,” the company said in press materials. “As a result, the Barracuda family of AAVs is 30 percent cheaper on average than other solutions, enabling affordable mass and cost-effective, large-scale employment.”

According to Anduril’s press release, its “hyper-scale” approach would allow the firm to double production capacity on demand, using a combination of modular systems across different versions of the missiles, automated manufacturing, and simplified assembly that can be completed with just a handful of tools and minimal training.

The pressing need for cruise missile stockpiles

While the ongoing war in Ukraine has provided the West with a stark reminder of the importance of industrial capacity in large-scale conflicts, the need for larger stockpiles of modern cruise missiles, in particular, has for years been the subject of discussion surrounding a potential Pacific conflict.

Unlike ballistic missiles, which tend to be powered by liquid or solid-fueled rockets and travel along predictable arcing ballistic flight paths, cruise missiles operate more like tactical aircraft or suicide drones. Powered by air-breathing jet engines, like turbojets or turbofans, cruise missiles fly along fairly horizontal flight paths, like any other jet-powered aircraft, allowing them to change course to avoid heavily defended airspace while minimizing detectability by hiding behind the curvature of the earth and even the terrain during their approach.

While supersonic cruise missiles are not unheard of and today several hypersonic cruise missiles are in active development, most in-service cruise missiles, including the aforementioned AGM-158 JASSM family of weapons and the ship-launched Tomahawk, rely on their stealth and maneuverability to close with their targets at subsonic speeds.

In the past, Sandboxx News has argued that, in particular, one member of the JASSM family could play a pivotal role in defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion – the AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM). Yet, ironically, this weapon also serves as a perfect example of the production challenges Anduril’s Barracuda family aims to overcome.

As the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) pointed out after it wargamed American intervention into such a conflict, the United States could expect to have as many as 3,650 land-based AGM-158B JASSM-ER cruise missiles in service by 2026, but only around 450 of its ship-hunting sister missile, the LRASM. With so few LRASMs in service, the CSIS wargames saw the U.S. expend its entire inventory of these weapons within just the first week of fighting in each of the 24 wargame iterations they played out.

While the United States has several other anti-ship weapons in its arsenal, these long-range cruise missiles are among its most valuable, as they offer the range necessary to keep the launching aircraft outside the reach of enemy air defenses.

“I think one of the most glaring gaps in our portfolio is anti-ship weapons, especially air-launched ones, and LRASMs are particularly important since it gives you the ability to attack from standoff,” Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, told Air & Space Forces Magazine last year.

It’s also important to keep in mind that, while LRASM numbers would dwindle first, America’s multiple-thousand AGM-158 JASSM and AGM-158B JASSM-ER numbers may also begin to run out only months into a large-scale fight. As one Rand Corporation analysis assessed in 2021, the United States expended 115,983 mostly precision-guided munitions between 2014 and 2019 in its fight against the Islamic State alone, leading to a shortage of these weapons that stretched out for years after.

And as Air Force Acquisition Chief Will Roper explained in 2019, the limiting factor in replenishing those stocks was “the capacity to make them.”

With this very concern in mind, the Pentagon’s 2024 budget included provisions that aimed to double Lockheed Martin’s production capacity for the AGM-158 family of missiles, increasing from 500 per year to 1,000.

But at upwards of $3 million per LRASM and the technological complexity of these weapons only increasing with each subsequent iteration, the solution to America’s production capacity problem won’t be found on the JASSM line alone.

As Pettyjohn put it, “We do need to find ways to buy larger quantities of more affordable weapons.”

And that seems to be precisely what Anduril has in mind. As Anduril chief strategy officer Chris Brose explained in recent weeks, the firm believes the United States would need at least ten times its current stockpile of cruise missiles to effectively deter China, or barring that, to ensure the U.S. doesn’t “run out of stuff to shoot” within the first few weeks of such a war.

Speaking to Sandboxx News via e-mail this week, Anduril’s Communications Manager, Jackson Lingane, explained that the Barracuda-M production baseline would be in the neighborhood of multiple thousands per year, with the ability to double production capacity on short notice when the need arises.

The new Barracuda family of cruise missiles

Anduril’s Barracuda family of weapons, known as Barracuda-M, is made up of three different platforms with a great deal of commonality between them; dubbed Barracuda-M 100, 250, and 500. All three of these weapons are powered by small air-breathing turbojet engines, giving each a great deal of range and a reported top speed of some 500 knots (about 575 miles per hour).

Each iteration was designed specifically to minimize the complexity of production. Anduril claims each of these weapons can be assembled using ten tools or fewer, leveraging primarily commercially available components to minimize logistical bottlenecks, and designed for easy assembly with minimal training. This, combined with modular systems shared across iterations, is meant to make standing up new production lines faster and cheaper than previous weapon designs, while the designs’ modularity and open system software architecture allow for rapid upgrades with minimal interruption to production.

Anduril aims to make these high-performance cruise missiles with simple but robust hardware, allowing for most upgrades or improvements to be made through software changes alone, further minimizing the impact of these changes on their production lines.

“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,” explained Diem Salmon, Anduril’s vice president for air dominance and strike. “It’s been designed with the exact opposite approach, which is, I have to leverage commercial supply chains as much as possible. I have to make the weapon as simple to produce and as simple to assemble as possible.”

And while this program was only just revealed, we’ve learned that Anduril and the U.S. Air Force already have these weapons in testing. According to Anduril, they’ve been conducting independent
research and development (IRAD) testing of all three units for years already, including end-to-end flight testing of the M-500.

The first and smallest of these weapons is the Barracuda 100. This weapon (or one-way drone) measures 70 inches in length, with a diameter of 6 inches and an overall weight of roughly 110 pounds, including a 35-pound payload. When launched from a rotorcraft like the AH-64 Apache or a fixed-wing asset like the C-130, Anduril claims a whopping range of some 85 nautical miles (about 98 miles).

For a frame of reference, that means this weapon is only about 6 inches longer than a standard rocket-propelled Hellfire missile, with a one-inch smaller diameter and roughly the same weight – but the Barracuda-M 100 offers a warhead nearly twice the size and an astonishing 12 times the range. This added range and firepower could be a significant boon for platforms like the Apache, allowing it to engage targets from further away, limiting its vulnerability to anti-air fire.