Barracuda

Barracuda is a family of jet-powered, software-defined cruise missiles — sometimes grouped under the looser label of loitering munition — developed by Anduril Industries and, under a partnership announced in early 2025, being adapted and produced for European customers by Rheinmetall . Anduril unveiled the family in September 2024 as three variants — Barracuda-100M, Barracuda-250M and Barracuda-500M — each scaled for a different range and payload bracket. The Rheinmetall partnership extends that line to Europe, with the German prime positioned to manufacture and integrate the system for armed forces on the continent.

The design philosophy is the most distinctive thing about the system. Anduril built Barracuda around commercial supply chains and design-for-manufacture, with claims of roughly seventy percent fewer parts than comparable cruise missiles and a unit cost a fraction of incumbents. The munition is propelled by a small turbojet rather than the rocket motor common to short-range loitering munitions, giving it the standoff range of a cruise missile while retaining the launch flexibility of a one-way attack drone. All three variants are software-defined and run on Anduril’s Lattice command-and-control stack, which allows autonomy tasks — terminal guidance, target reacquisition, swarming behaviour, navigation under GPS denial — to be updated through firmware rather than airframe changes. Payloads, seekers and warheads are modular, swapped without redesigning the body.

The system has not entered series production and has no public operators at the time of writing. Anduril has positioned Barracuda for the United States Department of Defense, including the United States Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle programme, while the Rheinmetall partnership specifically targets European procurement. The choice of Rheinmetall as the European partner is consequential: the Düsseldorf prime is one of the few firms in Europe with both the metalwork and the political access to scale a missile programme quickly, and it has been visibly building a portfolio of long-range strike options as European militaries absorb the lessons of Ukraine.

Barracuda sits in a crowded but immature segment between the small loitering munitions used by Ukrainian and Russian forces in large numbers and the higher-end cruise missiles produced by MBDA, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Its bet — that software-defined autonomy and commercial manufacturing can compress the price of long-range precision strike by an order of magnitude — is the wager Anduril has made across its catalogue, now extended into Europe through Rheinmetall.