Anduril, the defense tech startup founded by Palmer Luckey, released an anime-inspired trailer for its new cruise missile on Thursday.
The trailer’s aesthetic is extremely Evangelion. It opens with a faceless man in a Hawaiian shirt (presumably Luckey) reading a newspaper. “U.S. Urgently Needs More Missiles to Deter China,” screams the headline. Then it cuts to a NERV-style factory that’s churning out tons of the new Barracuda-M missile.
The pitch is that Anduril can make missiles faster, cheaper, and easier than the competition. “Barracuda-M is the most producible cruise missile on the market today: 50 percent less time to produce, 95 percent fewer tools, 50 percent fewer parts—at a fraction of the cost,” says the description under the video.
Cruise missiles are expensive and the market has long been dominated by legacy defense contractors like Raytheon. Broadly, the goal of a cruise missile and other standoff missiles is to strike an enemy target from a distance and avoid retaliatory fire. But a Tomahawk costs about $2 million to make and two years to build. Shipping weapons to Ukraine and Israel and defending the Red Sea from Houthis has severely depleted America’s stockpile of missiles.
Western military powers have also watched what Ukraine has been able to do while fighting back thousands of Russian tanks. Expensive cruise missiles are effective, but Kyiv has been able to destroy Russian armor at a fraction of the cost with off the shelf drones carrying improvised explosives.
The Pentagon has been paying attention and it wants more munitions faster and cheaper. A new breed of Silicon Valley defense tech disruptors, typified by Luckey, have rushed to fill the space. “These are systems that can be assembled with tools, literally, that you probably have in your garage – screwdrivers, pliers, things of that sort,” Anduril’s Chief Strategy Officer Chris Brose told The War Zone. “So it is not gated in terms of its producibility on highly specialized tooling, highly specialized manufacturing processes, highly specialized labor, none of which we’re ever going to have enough of.”
The Barracuda family of missiles includes three different variants, each with its own M variation. Anduril has not specifically said what the unit cost of any of the missiles is. “The Barracuda family of [Autonomous Air Vehicles] is 30 percent cheaper on average than other solutions, enabling affordable mass and cost-effective, large-scale employment,” the company said in a post on its website. Thirty percent cheaper than what, exactly? Cruise missile prices vary wildly. The Tomahawk costs millions, sure, but Hellfires are as cheap as $200,000.
Luckey isn’t the only tech-bro chasing dreams of cheaper cruise missiles and fat Pentagon contracts. Last month, YCombinator announced it was backing Ares Industries, a company that’s promising to bring the cost of $3 million anti-ship cruise missiles down to $300,000.
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