The larger Barracuda-250 is rated to carry the same 35-pound payload, but with a significant boost in range out to more than 200 nautical miles (about 230 miles) when launched from aircraft. In an air-launched profile, this weapon is also only 70 inches long, less than half the length of an AIM-120 AMRAAM. At 7 inches in diameter, the M-250 weighs in at a paltry 200 pounds.

This means the Barracuda M-250 can be carried internally by all three variants of the F-35 (including the F-35B with its slightly smaller payload capacity), or externally on fighters like the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18.

While a 35-pound warhead may not seem all that large, it is roughly three times the explosive power of a standard 155mm Howitzer projectile and nearly twice that of a Hellfire Missile, meaning it offers more than enough oomph to have a significant battlefield effect. But, if the 250 isn’t enough, you could opt for the largest of Anduril’s new cruise missile offerings, the Barracuda M-500.

Unlike the 100 and 250, the Barracuda M-500 can carry a 100-pound warhead to targets more than 500 nautical miles (~575 miles) away. This much larger weapon stretches a full 13 feet, with an 8-9 inch diameter and a total weight of around 400 pounds. That makes this weapon about one foot shorter and roughly 1,851 pounds lighter than a standard JASSM cruise missile.

According to Anduril, the Barracuda-500 can perform 5 G+ maneuvers along the way to its target and can even loiter for upwards of 120 minutes before ultimately engaging, which could be especially valuable if carrying an electronic warfare or surveillance payload, rather than a kinetic one.

And we now know that the M-500 was purpose-built for the Air Force Research Lab’s Rapid Dragon palletized missile launch system, which allows cargo aircraft like the C-130 and C-17 to deploy large volleys of JASSM-type cruise missiles in short order.

Just last week, on September 12, Aduril conducted a successful flight test of Barracuda-500 as part of the initial test phase of the Air Force Armament Directorate (EB) and Defense Innovation Unit’s (DIU) Enterprise Test Vehicle (ETV) program. This test saw the weapon launched from a vertical cell meant to emulate “palletized employment” like the Rapid Dragon launch system.

This test demonstrated the weapon’s ability to launch, extend its wings, establish guidance, and fly autonomously for roughly 30 minutes – including some aggressive maneuvering – before ultimately scoring a direct hit on a 48-inch by 40-inch target.

While our sources at Anduril could share these details with us, they said they are currently working through Air Force approvals to release photos and videos from the test.

Introducing the Barracuda to Rapid Dragon

The Air Force Research Lab’s Rapid Dragon program is a palletized missile launch system designed to enable C-130s or C-17s to launch a large volume of low-observable cruise missiles from stand-off ranges.

It includes a modular palletized munition system that allows for stacks of six missiles per pallet in the C-130 and as many as nine per pallet in the larger C-17. These pallets were designed to accommodate the AGM-158 family of weapons, including the original JASSM, the longer-ranged JASSM-ER, and the ship-hunting LRASM. The C-130 can accommodate two pallets of six weapons, allowing it to rapidly launch as many as 12 cruise missiles, whereas the massive C-17 can carry five pallets of nine missiles each, allowing a single Globemaster to launch 45 weapons in extremely short order.

The pallets are rolled out the back of the aircraft like any other airdrop. Once deployed, a parachute opens to stabilize the pallet as the onboard control system fires the missiles to begin their trek of more than 500 miles (and potentially greater than 600) to their targets where they will deliver 1,100-pound explosive warheads to land or sea targets.

As Sandboxx News has covered numerous times in the past, Rapid Dragon provides several significant advantages, including freeing up tactical aircraft for more complex operations; an extremely low cost per weapon launched; and the sheer volume of weapons it can flood enemy airspace with… But Rapid Dragon does face one significant problem: having enough weapons to launch.

With as few as just 450 LRASMs in service by 2026 (though that figure is likely to be higher), a single C-17 could expend America’s entire stockpile of these weapons in just ten sorties. America’s much larger stockpile of land-attack JASSM-ERs, projected to be around 3,600 by 2026, would take much longer, but could still be expended in just 80 C-17 Rapid Dragon sorties. Of course, that is an immense amount of firepower, but in a conflict with a military the size of China’s People’s Liberation Army, there would be no shortage of targets.

And that’s where the Barracuda-500 could truly shine. As Salmon explained, the Barracuda-500 is, in fact, meant to be “cargo-launched” from the same Rapid Dragon cargo pallets. This, Salmon points out, would also alleviate the need to integrate these missiles into other aircraft – a process that adds time and expense to the rollout of any new weapon system.

The modularity of these systems could also help to improve their chances of success. As Anduril’s Jackson Lingane told Sandboxx News, “Since Barracuda can be configured with a range of payloads, you could send one Barracuda variant equipped with an EW payload forward to distract adversary air defenses, clearing a path for Barracuda-M variants equipped with munition payloads to reach their targets.”

With just a 100-pound warhead, the Barracuda-500 would not be able to engage the same sorts of targets as the JASSM-ER’s 1,000-pound WDU-42/B penetrating blast fragmentation warhead, but importantly, not every target requires that much explosive power.

The aforementioned AGM-114 Hellfire missile, for instance, is a broadly useful weapon system despite carrying only a 20-pound blast fragmentation warhead – one-fifth the size of the Barracuda-500s. Other common air-to-ground munitions employed by the United States carry similar payloads, like the AGM-88 HARM’s 150-pound warhead or the early AGM-65 Maverick’s 126-pound shaped charges.

Using the Barracuda to hunt for enemy ships

Despite its limited warhead size, there is also a reasonable argument to be made for the M-500 to serve in a limited anti-ship capacity.

The Barracuda-500’s 100-pound warhead would likely be seen by most Navy leaders as insufficient for anti-ship duties. Traditionally speaking, the rule of thumb for anti-ship weapons tends to be that the amount of thousand-pound-bomb equivalents required to disable a warship is approximately equal to the cube root of one-thousandth of a ship’s tonnage. As such, the U.S. Navy tends to prefer larger anti-ship warheads of 500 pounds or more.

But the Barracuda could still prove to be a potent ship-hunting system, if it can overcome a bit of cultural inertia.

Anti-ship weapons have some very specific guidance system requirements, as identifying and closing with a moving warship against the vast backdrop of the open ocean is no small undertaking. When we asked Anduril’s team if the modular M-500 could be equipped with guidance systems capable of accomplishing this feat, they answered simply, “yes, absolutely.”

On April 14, 2022, Ukrainian forces sank the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the 9,380-ton guided-missile cruiser Moskva, with just two Neptune anti-ship missiles, each carrying fairly small 330-pound warheads. Media reports suggest the Neptune impacts may have caused a secondary explosion of a large missile housed inside the ship, resulting in it going down just hours later. Based on that traditional rule of thumb, it should have taken at least three Neptune cruise missiles to bring the warship down.

As retired U.S. Navy Commander Alan D. Zimm explained in 2022, the anti-ship weapon rule of thumb is wrong for two important reasons. First, it fails to consider the impact of fire damage caused by a warhead’s detonation and the toxic gasses that accompany such fires. And second, modern ships are more densely packed with explosive materials and tend to be less heavily armored than the World War II-era vessels this rule was based on. Zimm contends that precision guidance can dramatically offset warhead size by specifically targeting vulnerabilities in a ship’s armor or essential systems.

“When I stood watch in CIC on a nuclear-powered cruiser some years ago, during the quiet mid-watches, for training, we would play the ’22 Game.’ Each watchstander was assumed to have a 22-caliber pistol (virtually, of course), and two rounds. The object of the game was to determine where to shoot those two rounds to cause the maximum damage to the ship’s warfighting capability,” Zimm wrote in Proceedings. “The resulting arguments were fierce, informative, and shocking—my sailors found ways to shut down the ship nearly completely with two puny bullets.”

As Zimm sees it, longer range is more useful in modern anti-ship weapons than larger warheads, which is precisely what the Barracuda-500 would offer.

Adding Barracudas to a much larger family of weapons and platforms

In a Pacific conflict in the near future, Rapid Dragon-equipped cargo aircraft carrying pallets of LRASMs and JASSM-ERs programmed to engage adversary warships and hardened ground targets could be bolstered by a large number of cheaper Barracuda M-500s launched from the same pallets, dramatically increasing the overall number of targets saturating enemy airspace at the onset of the attack, and dramatically complicating matters for air defenders trying to keep these weapons from finding their targets.