Barracuda-M

Barracuda is a family of autonomous, turbojet-powered air vehicles unveiled by Anduril Industries in September 2024 and pitched squarely at one problem: the cruise missile has become too expensive and too slow to build to matter in a long war. Where a Tomahawk costs in the millions and rolls off a constrained production line, Anduril designed the Barracuda around manufacturability — far fewer parts, an order of magnitude fewer specialised tools, and a few dozen labour hours per airframe, built largely from commercial components by a workforce drawn from the automotive and electronics industries rather than traditional aerospace. The result, the company says, is a missile that can be produced at “hyper scale” for under $200,000 a unit.

The line comes in three sizes that scale range and payload. The Barracuda-100M is the smallest, with a range in the low hundreds of kilometres and launch options spanning ground vehicles, helicopters and palletised airdrop from a C-130 using the Rapid Dragon system. The mid-size 250M is air-launched only, fitting inside an F-35’s internal bay or under an F-15 or F-16, and reaches around 370 kilometres. The largest, the 500M, flies past 900 kilometres, carries a warhead of more than 45 kilograms, can loiter for over two hours, and has been allocated the US military designation AGM-189A. A surface-launched version, the SLB-500M, packs as many as sixteen rounds into a standard shipping container. All of them are subsonic and built to fly and coordinate as a group under Anduril’s Lattice software, so a salvo can mix decoys and strikers and reorganise itself in flight.

The headline customer is the US Army. In May 2026 Anduril signed a framework agreement to deliver a minimum of 3,000 surface-launched 500M missiles, at least a thousand a year from 2027, alongside containerised launchers slated for the Indo-Pacific. Barracuda also sits inside the Pentagon’s Low-Cost Cruise Missile effort and the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle programme, where it competes against entrants from CoAspire, Leidos and Zone 5. The benchmark Anduril keeps returning to is Raytheon’s Tomahawk — not on performance, but on how many can be built, and how fast.