Anduril, the defense technology startup founded by Palmer Luckey, released an anime-inspired trailer for its new cruise missile on Thursday.
The beauty of the trailer is Evangelion in the extreme. It opens with a faceless man in a Hawaiian shirt (presumably Luckey) reading a newspaper. “US Urgently Needs More Missiles to Deter China,” screamed the headline. Then it’s off to the NERV-style factory churning out tons of new Barracuda-M missiles.
The pitch is that Anduril can make arrows faster, cheaper, and easier than the competition. “The Barracuda-M is the most mass-produced cruise missile on the market today: 50 percent less manufacturing time, 95 percent fewer tools, 50 percent fewer parts—at half the cost,” says the description under the video.
Cruise missiles are expensive and the market has long been dominated by legacy defense contractors such as Raytheon. Broadly speaking, the purpose of a cruise missile and other cruise missiles is to hit an enemy target from a distance and avoid retaliatory fire. But the Tomahawk costs about $2 million to make and two years to build. Sending weapons to Ukraine and Israel and securing the Red Sea from the Houthis has largely depleted America’s missile arsenal.
Western military powers are also watching what Ukraine has been able to do while fighting thousands of Russian tanks. Expensive missiles are effective, but Kyiv has been able to destroy Russian weapons at a fraction of the cost with off-the-shelf drones carrying advanced explosives.
The Pentagon has been paying attention and looking for more weapons quickly and cheaply. A new breed of Silicon Valley tech disruptors, typified by Luckey, rushed to fill the void. “These are systems that can be put together with tools, literally, that you probably have in your garage — screws, pliers, things like that,” Anduril Chief Strategy Officer Chris Brose told War Zone. “So it is not gated in terms of its productivity in the use of special tools, very special production processes, special workers, none of which we will ever have enough of.”
The Barracuda family of darters includes three different species, each with its own variation of M. Anduril didn’t say exactly what the unit cost is for any of the missiles. “Barracuda family [Autonomous Air Vehicles] is 30 percent cheaper on average than other solutions, allowing more people to afford and cost-effectively access large jobs,” the company said in a post on its website. Thirty percent cheaper than the price, really? Cruise missile prices vary widely. The Tomahawk costs millions, sure, but the Hellfire is as cheap as $200,000.
Luckey isn’t the only tech-bro chasing dreams of cheap cruise missiles and fat Pentagon contracts. Last month, YCombinator announced it was backing Ares Industries, a company that promises to reduce the cost of a $3 million anti-ship missile to $300,000.
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