If you're a Lord of the Rings super fan, you surely know of Anduril, the sword billed as the "Flame of the West" that pops up periodically in the film franchise. It's also now the name of a $14 billion defense tech startup that's boasting a new missile line it vows will "rebuild America's arsenal of air-breathing precision-guided munitions and air vehicles," per Quartz. The new missile lineup features three different Barracuda models, and according to the company, they're all able to be manufactured with 50% fewer parts and 95% fewer tools than its competitors require—meaning the missiles can be mass-produced in half the time.
"As a result, the Barracuda family ... is 30% cheaper on average than other solutions," Anduril says in a statement. The streamlined missiles will also allow the United States to "bring mass to the fight," the company tells Business Insider, which notes concerns that the nation may not be able to keep churning out advanced munitions quickly enough if the US were to ever become embroiled in a war with a historically strong foe like Russia or China. Chris Brose, Anduril's chief strategy officer, tells Air & Space Forces that recently conducted war games depict the US running out of key munitions in just weeks were a big conflict to begin.
"Then we struggle, or theoretically would struggle, for a period of years to replenish all the weapons that we expended," he says, citing Ukraine as an example of where this is currently happening. "We need an order of magnitude more missiles—and we need them to be simple and affordable enough to produce at scale to meet both peacetime and wartime demands," Anduril says in its statement. All three variants—Barracuda-100, Barracuda-250, and Barracuda-500—are currently flying, a company exec tells Defense One. The company, founded by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, raised $1.5 billion last month to "rebuild the arsenal of Democracy." (More missile stories.)
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