Barracuda family of cruise missiles aims to reduce swarm capacity

In response to the return to mass peer-to-peer warfare, Anduril has unveiled a new family of Barracuda autonomous cruise missiles that can be built at a “hyperscale” scale to conduct intelligent swarm attacks against hardened targets.

The current geopolitical situation and conflicts in many parts of the world have shown that decades of post-Cold War counter-insurgency warfare are giving way to a renewed threat of mass clashes of armed forces.

This is not only a serious threat to world peace, but also highlights the serious shortcomings of Western military power. As the aid sent to help Ukraine fight the Russian invasion has shown, Western weapons stockpiles may include extraordinary, state-of-the-art equipment, but they are not very large and would be quickly depleted in the event of a major conflict.

According to Anduril, the problem is so serious that the West’s reserves of precision weapons could be depleted within days. As if that weren’t enough, such precision munitions are no longer designed to operate alone. They are becoming increasingly autonomous and designed to work together as a team, independently deciding which targets to hit and which weapons to hit.

What this all boils down to is that the West needs to build up its stockpiles. And fast.

The Barracuda family of three autonomous aerial vehicles (AAV) variants was designed to solve this problem.

The Barracuda 100, Barracuda 250, and Barracuda 500 are air-breathing, software-defined expendable AAVs, with each version having increased size, payload, and range. Each version’s number indicates the range of the turbojet-powered missile in nautical miles: 100 nmi (115 mi, 185 km), 250 nmi (287 mi, 463 km), and 500 nmi (575 mi, 926 km). They have a payload capacity of over 100 lb (45 kg), can maneuver at 5 g, and can loiter for 120 minutes to conduct direct, standoff, and standoff attacks.

However, what sets the Barracuda family apart is that they all share a common design that is compatible with a range of mission payloads. This configuration is intended not only to simplify the missile architecture, but also to make it easier, cheaper and faster to produce in large quantities.

Rather than being highly complex and requiring specialized tools and technicians to assemble it, the Barracuda has a software-defined modular design that the company says allows it to be assembled in half the time of conventional missiles, while using 95 percent fewer tools and 50 percent fewer parts. Overall, this makes it 30 percent cheaper to manufacture and suitable for mass production, including short-term surges.

Not only does the Barracuda require fewer than 10 tools to assemble, it doesn’t require the specially trained technicians that other missiles require. That means it can be built on standard automotive and consumer electronics production lines, bypassing the bottleneck that plagues the modern defense industry, which has merged into several companies. In addition, the Barracuda uses off-the-shelf components for its subsystems, which helps with logistics.

Barracuda uses Anduril Lattice for Mission Autonomy software, which enables it to be collaborative and autonomous. This means that it not only targets a target, but can be deployed in intelligent swarms to work with other missiles and piloted aircraft, making decisions and delegating tasks such as which missile will be best suited to destroy a given target, whether to fly toward a target or circle, act as a decoy, and in what order attacks should be conducted for maximum effect.

“This package can deliver the mission impact we need without having to put everything into one aircraft and dramatically increasing the cost of each round of each vehicle,” a company spokesman said.

Source: Anduril