By 
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Anduril Industries plans next year to build more than a thousand Barracuda-500 cruise missiles for foreign and domestic buys, company officials said on Tuesday.
The Air Force’s Franklin Affordable Mass Missile (FAMM) program is a key driver of the planned production ramp, Steve Milano, senior director for advanced effects, said in a media roundtable. Lug-launched variants of the Barracuda-500 also factor into the present demand signal as do potential international orders for the baseline variant of the autonomous air vehicle, he said at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference.
The company is in negotiations for potential orders and if it had to could be at a production rate of 5,000 Barracuda-500s by the end of 2026, Milano said. Production capacity at its manufacturing facility in Costa Mesa, Calif., tops out at 2,000 per year and the upcoming new Arsenal plant the company is establishing in Columbus, Ohio, would account for the rest, he said. Production at Arsenal is expected to begin in the second half of 2026, he said.
Senior Defense Department leaders have been emphasizing that closing the munitions gap is a priority and so Anduril “is investing and putting a lot of our focus to support that desire from the department, realizing that one of the biggest things that they’re trying to solve is an inventory gap, which just ultimately comes down to manufacturing,” Diem Salmon, for air dominance and strike, said.
Rapidly being able to hyperscale manufacturing of its products has been one of Anduril’s focus areas. Milano pointed out that the company does not need a specific order to dramatically accelerate production although the company will tailor its investments accordingly.
The Barracuda-500 variants share 90 percent commonality between their parts, which means they can be built on the same production lines with the same workers.
Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] Common Multi-Mission Truck System is also a potential contender for FAMM, which the Air Force wants as a low-cost, long-range strike weapon (Defense Daily, March 3).
Anduril in September, 2024 introduced its family of Barracuda autonomous air vehicles and cruise missile variants (Defense Daily, Sept. 12, 2024). Since then, it has conducted pallet launches of the Barracuda-500 as part of the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle program and a surface-launched test, which the company also announced on Tuesday. The Barracuda-100 has also been lug-launched from a fixed-wing aircraft as part of the Army’s High-Speed Maneuverable Missile program (Defense Daily, July 16).
The surface-launched Barracuda-500 includes a solid rocket motor booster that Anduril designed and built to get it airborne. The system is also designed to be launched from existing platforms such as HIMARS and others, the company said.
