Our existing arsenals of precision-guided munitions would be exhausted in a matter of days in a high-end fight

Thursday, September 12th, 2024

Anduril has unveiled its Barracuda family of cruise missiles — or “air-breathing, software-defined expendable Autonomous Air Vehicles (AAVs)” — that are optimized for “affordable, hyper-scale production”:

The United States and our allies and partners do not have enough missiles to credibly deter conflict with a near-peer adversary. Our 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 upgradeability 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 upgradeability.

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.

[…]

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.

Comments

  1. Jim says:

    “Our” existing arsenals?

    “We” need an order of magnitude more weapons?

    Thiel et al. aren’t wrong that the U.S. government is short of munitions enough to spread the good news of transsexualism to schoolchildren at home and abroad, but how is that their problem (or ours)?

  2. T. Beholder says:

    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.
    […]
    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.

    Hey, a big room planet, it has an echo! US is learning to think this way about 90 years behind some of their old partners.

    Of course, at this point they struggle to as much as maintain basic infrastructure, and don’t seem to have anyone both able and willing to cut the obvious cancer.

    So this only illustrates the real problem. Even an occasional sober word here and there amid all the delusions is but another brick swept by avalanche. It’s lost in so much other rubble that it’s not even likely to make things noticeably worse. Making things noticeably better even for the tiniest area and duration would require something at least two orders of magnitude larger, and not randomly dropped.

  3. VXXC says:

    The driving genius behind this is 31 year old Palmer Lucky, inventor of the Occulus Rift VR headset, and his company makes Lattice OS for war and other drones, moreover he’s secured $1.5B in funding for his factory to exactly hyperscale production of his various drones. He’s very patriotic. He is a genius, he is a runaway success, he is a 31 year old Elon Musk from California.

    Anduril.com

    https://www.rebuildthearsenal.com/

    https://www.anduril.com/article/anduril-raises-usd1-5-billion-to-rebuild-the-arsenal-of-democracy/

    Now praise God that someone is doing something and that the young have at last begun to stand and take what is THEIRS. This means our sacrifice wasn’t in vain and our people – Americans – go on.

    Having said that, listen fellow grumpy old bastards, being one myself, seriously stop nay saying the young, it’s ok to be old and grumpy, it’s not ok to be a miserable old C–T.

    Rejoice, the young men stand.

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