Anduril is unveiling the Barracuda family of air-breathing, software-defined expendable autonomous air vehicles (AAVs) that are optimized for affordable, hyper-scale production.
The Barracuda family of AAVs consists of Barracuda-100, Barracuda-250 and Barracuda-500. Each increment offers increasing size, range and payload capacity, but all Barracudas are compatible with a host of payloads and employment mechanisms, support a variety of different missions, and provide warfighters with an adaptable and upgradeable capability to counter evolving threats. Barracuda-M is the munition configuration of Barracuda that delivers a more affordable, producible, available and adaptable cruise missile capability than existing options available to warfighters today.
The U.S., allies and partners do not have enough missiles to credibly deter conflict with a near-peer adversary. Existing arsenals of precision-guided munitions would be exhausted in a matter of days in a high-end fight. The problem extends beyond inventory alone, however: existing cruise missiles are defined by limited production capacity, nonexistent on-call surge capacity and minimal upgradability when technology and mission needs inevitably change. That is because existing missile designs are highly complex, require thousands of unique tools to produce, demand highly-specialized labor and materials, and are built on the backs of tenuous, brittle and defense-specific supply chains. We need an order of magnitude more weapons, and we need them to be more producible, intelligent, upgradeable and flexible.
The Barracuda family of AAVs is designed to rebuild America’s arsenal of air-breathing precision-guided munitions and air vehicles. Barracuda features advanced autonomous behaviors and other software-defined capabilities, and it is available in configurations offering 500+ nautical miles of range, 100+ pounds of payload capacity, 5 Gs of maneuverability and more than 120 minutes of loitering time. The vehicle’s fast speeds, high maneuverability and extended ranges are made possible by Barracuda’s turbojets, air-breathing engines that take in air to combust their fuel. The result is a highly intelligent, low-cost weapon system that is capable of direct, stand-in, or stand-off strike missions in line with existing requirements but rapidly adaptable to future mission needs due to its high degree of modularity and upgradability.
Barracuda-100M, Barracuda-250M and Barracuda-500M are the most producible cruise missiles on the market today. 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. 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.
Designed for agile and affordable hyper-scale production
Barracuda is purpose-built to bring mass to the fight. Designed from the ground-up for hyper-scale manufacturing, Barracuda production rates are designed to keep pace with the threat and can be doubled on-call to meet short-term surges in demand.
Barracuda is designed to be simple to manufacture, both in terms of tooling and talent. Designed for rapid assembly at low cost, the Barracuda family of AAVs only requires ten or less tools to assemble, ensuring that both new and existing production lines can be rapidly spun up to produce AAVs at hyper-scale. The simplicity of Barracuda’s design and manufacturing process has an additional benefit: Barracuda can be produced by the broad commercial automotive and consumer electronics workforce, rather than relying exclusively on the much smaller, over-stretched, highly-specialized, defense-specific manufacturing labor pool required to produce existing solutions.
Every Barracuda variant is made up of a handful of common subsystems to ensure that the missiles can be rapidly optimized based on changing mission needs. New subsystems can be rapidly swapped into live production lines when threats evolve and new technologies emerge, providing warfighters with the agility required to adapt at mission speed. And unlike existing solutions that leverage brittle, defense-specific supply chains, Barracuda’s subsystems are made up of commercially derived and widely-available components that provide supply chain resiliency, redundancy and surge capacity.
Software-defined performance
While the simplicity of Barracuda’s hardware design is what enables hyper-scale production, software is what differentiates Barracuda’s performance. Powered and controlled by Anduril’s Lattice for Mission Autonomy software, Barracuda is capable of novel autonomous and collaborative behaviors, unlocking new concepts of employment that increase survivability and effectiveness against large target sets in contested environments. And, as a software-defined, hardware-enabled platform, Barracuda’s performance and behaviors can be rapidly and continuously updated to meet evolving mission requirements at the speed of relevance, unlike existing exquisite cruise missiles that require months or years to update.
Purpose-built for flexible employment
Barracuda variants can be employed from a variety of different air, ground or maritime platforms to support a range of mission sets. Compatible with internal weapons bays of 5G aircraft, external rails of fourth-generation fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, MFOM launchers and Common Launch Tubes (CLTs), surface vessels, palletized employment from airlift aircraft, and more, Barracuda provides theater commanders with flexible employment options.