Can Low-Cost Weapons Save the U.S. from Running Out of Missiles in the Next War?

Defense company Anduril unveiled a new family of cruise missile weapons called Barracuda in mid-September, which it began developing on its own initiative. The company says that all three significant variants have already been flight-tested. The current focus is on subsystem development and funding the company’s planned ‘hyper-production’ facility.

Barracuda is pitched as a “low cost but performant,” weapon that is “…simple to manufacture, software-designed, mass producible,” the company’s Chief Strategy Officer Chris Brose said at a press briefing. The public unveiling was accompanied by anime-inspired promotional video, see above.

Low-Cost Weapons: What Washington Needs for the Next War?

Does the U.S. military need the very best weapons money can buy—or the most cost-effective ones it can quickly build in quantity? As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine voraciously consumes munition supplies across the planet, many argue it’s time to tilt in the latter direction.

A Tomahawk cruise missile, for example, averages over $2 million per unit and currently takes over two years to build. Consider that in a single day’s strike targeting Houthi rebels in Yemen this year, the U.S. Navy expended 80 Tomahawks, while having procured only 55 the preceding year.

The CSIS think tank reported in 2023 that a series of wargames found that the U.S. might expend guided missile stockpiles in a few frenetic weeks of high-intensity combat to prevent an invasion of Taiwan. That’s because to avoid the deadly, high-density fires China can generate near its shores, the U.S. would rely heavily on cruise missiles launched from hundreds of miles away to sink invasion ships.

Enter Barracuda

Concerns over missile supply have crystalized in at least three Pentagon programs seeking low-cost cruise missiles buyable in bulk: the Navy’s Coalition Affordable Maritime Strike program (CAMS), the Air Force Materials Command’s ERAM, which initially aimed at arming Ukraine’s air force, and the Enterprise Test Vehicle (ETV) program of the Defense Innovation Unit and Air Force for which Barracudas one of four contenders.

Barracuda 100 Cruise Missile. Image Credit: Company Handout.

Barracuda encompasses three weapons designed for use at different ranges by different combinations of launch platforms on air, sea, and land. They all share a similar profile and turbojet engine, giving them a maximum speed of up to 575 miles an hour. Furthermore, all three are offered in an additional ‘M’ model optimized for mass production.

The company said it was still working out customer-specific requirements on guidance methods and payloads, but these would be modular (allowing swap-in of different guidance methods and warheads based on target type). This enables support of a wide range of capabilities without having to pay for all of them in each missile. Some could even be used for non-kinetic missions such as air-launched decoys.

They will also share common navigation systems hardened against GPS denial, with autonomy via the Lattice AI system Anduril has integrated in other systems, including loitering munitions and its Fury Loyal Wingman drone. Brose argued that Lattice-driven collaboration between missiles engaged in the same mission could improve success rates without the hard costs of physically installing survivability technologies.

He also said modularity and an open-architecture design would facilitate tailoring Barracuda components for overseas clients to avoid part-specific export restrictions and enable easy and rapid integration of capability upgrades (such as new maneuvers, behaviors, target-detection algorithms, etc.), particularly by third parties.

The priority pitch to the Air Force is Barracuda-500, designed for underwing carriage by fighters—or launchable from a ‘Rapid Dragon’ cargo pallet released by a C-130 or C-17 cargo plane. These boast over 575 miles range, or up to two hours endurance for ‘loitering’ missions, and have a 100+ pound payload (going to the warhead and/or electronic warfare or reconnaissance systems.

Compared to the Baracuda-500, Brose said the smaller Barracuda-100 and Barracude-250 models, which have 35-pound payloads, are somewhat mode more akin to loitering munitions (AKA kamikaze drones).

Barracuda-100 is aimed at the Apache and AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters of the Army and Marine Corps, respectively; surface-launch (with a shorter 70-mile range); and Marine Corps KC-130J Harvester and Air Force AC-130 gunship aircraft, which can launch missiles from a side ‘derringer’ door using a system called Common Launch Tube, which Barracuda-100 is compatible with. Though helicopters and gunships have traditionally employed short-range missiles, the general trend is to arm them with longer-range indirect-fire weapons due to the lethality of modern short-range air defenses.

Barracuda 250 Cruise Missile. Image Credit: Industry Handout.

Barracuda-250, with a range of over 230 miles, is designed for stowage in the internal launch bays of bombers and stealth fighters and externally by fourth-generation warplanes. It’s also surface-launchable from Army and Marine M270 and M142 rocket artillery platforms and surface ships, with a range of 170 miles in that configuration (lying between that of M39 rockets and the new PrSM tactical ballistic already used by those launchers).

Diem Salmon, VP of Air Dominance and Strike said the guiding design principle was to devise Barracudas to be buildable at least 30% lower price than equivalent systems in service. This led to “focusing on sub-systems and reusability, making it simpler rather than designing bespoke capabilities. Relying on open-architecture and using commercial components help keep the cost down.”

Regarding the 30% figure, Salmon highlighted SDBs as a comparison point for Barracuda-100 and -250, and long-range missiles for Barracuda-500.

Perhaps the more radical feature is improved producibility—the company aims to make Barracudas buildable in half as much time, using half as many components, and with 95% fewer unique tools, making it easily adaptable by additional factories. Brose said this means it can be “produced by broad commercial automotive and consumer electronics workforce.”

He contrasted these with arms reliant on “defense-specific supply chains, very complex manual manufacturing processes, exquisite materials. Such that these systems become incredibly difficult—all but impossible—to produce in volumes.”

While broadly arguing munitions inventory should increase by a factor of 10, Brose conceded “…its unrealistic to know exactly how many we’ll need to produce 10 years from now.” The key, he argued, is ability to ramp production up quickly when the demand hits.

Question mark: Small Warheads on Far-Flying Missiles?

The conventional wisdom is that if you’re paying big bucks for a weapon that can travel far, you might as well ensure it packs a wallop. Thus, it’s eyebrow-raising to compare the 35- and 100-pound payloads on Barracudas to an M31 GMRL artillery rocket with a 200-pound warhead, a HARM anti-radar missile (150 lbs.), a Harpoon anti-ship missile (488 lbs.), and heavy Tomahawk and JASSM cruise missiles with half-ton warheads.

Barracudas compares more naturally with heavy loitering munitions like Israel’s Harops loitering munition (range 120 miles, 51-pound warhead) or the Air Force’s Small Diameter Bomb (SDB), which glides to a max range of 69 miles. Though SDBs support a 206 lb. warhead, several subtypes have only 36 or 137 pounds of explosive filler.

Thus, use cases for Barracuda encompass targets wherein the heavy warheads of Harpoons and Tomahawks are overkill—particularly air defense systems and radars, fuel stores, high-value ground vehicles, and unfortified facilities. Loitering capability, furthermore, might particularly facilitate the engagement of soft but time-sensitive and mobile targets like ballistic missile launchers, landed aircraft, and smaller vessels, including amphibious ship-to-shore connectors.

Thus, whether you find the small size problematic depends on how extensive and important one judges the above target set to be, compared to the demand for heavy munitions aimed at destroying large ships (the focus of the CSIS wargame); penetrating bunkers, missile silos and concrete hangars; or inflicting destructive effects over a wide area.

SDBs are effective thanks to achieving a very high degree of precision using GPS- or laser-guidance—landing on average within 1 meter of target. For similar efficiency in a major war, Barracudas must achieve similar terminal accuracy under GPS-denied conditions.

Risks and Opportunities

Anduril’s professed ‘lean ahead’ approach—initiating product developments in advance of official procurement—has risks when working with military procurement agencies that are notoriously picky. While Barracuda’s potential for “hyperscaling” might be invaluable in a crisis, it may require pre-World War III procurement to sustain itself commercially and integrate into a U.S. military userbase.

There’s also the risk that Lego-like assembly of modular missiles with swap-in guidance systems and payloads may prove more challenging than expected—sometimes components that should easily work together on paper do not do so in practice. That risk has bedeviled past efforts at modular Swiss-army knife weapon systems.

However, flexibility is a virtue. Russia for example has expended many anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles as land attack weapons because it has a shortage of land-attack missiles. CSIS simulation predicted the inverse demand in a Taiwan scenario: needing to sink lots of invasion ships, while possessing a relatively more land-attack than anti-ship weapons. The simulation design assumed the U.S. would devise a way to convert JASSM land-attack cruise missiles for anti-ship missions quickly.

As it stands, the services will evaluate whether Barracudas meets the requirements of their current procurement programs and, more generally, whether it places its bets on disruptive newcomers or more established defense corporations to deliver on promises of low-cost, high-volume weapons.

About the Author: Sébastien Roblin