유도탄 안두릴이 공개한 저가 순항미사일 Barracuda

[위종민]

안두릴이 저숙련 노동력과 간단한 도구로 대량생산이 가능하다는 순항미사일 3종을 공개했네요. 미공군이 요구한 게 아니라 회사 자체 개발로 중간유도나 최종유도 방식은 공개되지 않았습니다만 비행시험에 들어갔다고 합니다. 

바라쿠다-100, -250, -500 3종으로 가장 큰 500은 C-130등 수송기의 팔레트를 이용해 미사일을 발사하는 '래피드 드래곤' 발사방식이며, -250은 F-35의 내부 폭탄창에 장착 가능하다고 합니다. 

바라쿠다 시리즈는 500해리 이상의 사정거리, 100파운드 이상의 페이로드, 5G 이상의 기동성과 120분 이상의 체공시간을 갖췄다고 홍보하네요. 

관건인 가격은 비슷한 성능의 시스템보다 30% 저렴한 비용이 목표이고, 하위 시스템을 재사용하고 저렴한 재료로 더 쉽게 제조함으로 이를 달성할 수 있다고 합니다. 오픈 아키텍처를 채택하는 한편, 50% 줄어든 생산시간, 95% 감축한 생산 도구, 50% 적은 부품을 필요로 한다고.. 

Anduril Unveils New Low-Cost ‘Barracuda’ Cruise Missiles (airandspaceforces.com)

A Barracuda-250 cruise missile. Courtesy of Anduril

Expand Photo

Share Article

Anduril Unveils New Low-Cost Cruise Missiles Meant for Large-Scale Production

Sept. 12, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

Anduril Industries has revealed its “Barracuda” family of cruise missiles, intended to bulk up U.S. military stockpiles with a low-cost weapon that can be produced in large numbers by minimally trained labor with unspecialized tools.

The air-breathing weapons as yet have not been fitted with sensors, as customer needs are still undefined, but the weapons are in flight test, company officials told reporters Sept. 11. The Barracuda family is intended to be rapidly upgradable through software and an open-systems architecture.

The family of weapons comprises the Barracuda-100, -250, and -500.

The -500 is meant to be “cargo launched,” said Diem Salmon, Anduril vice president for air dominance and strike. This refers to the Air Force’s “Rapid Dragon” concept of launching pallets of cruise missiles from the back of a C-17 or C-130 transport, which has been tested using AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs).

It is also the kind of mission the Air Force and Defense Innovation Unit are exploring for their Enterprise Test Vehicle program, which got underway in June. Anduril is one of four competitors for the effort and is pitching the Barracuda-500, Salmon said. The other companies in the running are Integrated Solutions for Systems, Inc.; Leidos Dynetics; and Zone 5 Technologies. Salmon couldn’t comment on the ETV program progress.

The pallet-launched missiles “do not necessarily require aircraft integration,” she said. The -250, meanwhile, is designed to be carried internally on the F-35 and other platforms.

The Barracuda is “available in configurations offering 500+ nautical miles of range, 100+ pounds of payload capacity, 5 Gs of maneuverability, and more than 120 minutes of loitering time,” the company said in a press release.

“All Barracudas are compatible with a host of payloads and employment mechanisms, support a variety of different missions, and provide warfighters with an adaptable and upgradeable capability to counter evolving threats,” the company said.

A Barracuda-100 cruise missile. Courtesy of Anduril

A Barracuda-500 cruise missile. Courtesy of Anduril

A Barracuda-500 cruise missile. Courtesy of Anduril

Anduril is “targeting 30 percent less cost than systems that are comparable in performance,” Salmon said, but she did not offer comparisons with specific weapons. The company thinks that this level of savings can be achieved by reusing subsystems and easier manufacture with low-cost materials.

“So, rather than designing bespoke capabilities for each single weapon system, how do we make this simpler?” Salmon said. Open architectures is one solution, while designing the missile to be made by a factory worker with little specialized knowledge, using a small number of tools and parts, is another.

“A single Barracuda takes 50 percent less time to produce, requires 95 percent fewer tools, and 50 percent fewer parts than competing solutions on the market today,” the company said in press materials. “As a result, the Barracuda family of AAVs is 30 percent cheaper on average than other solutions, enabling affordable mass and cost-effective, large-scale employment.”

Anduril rolled out its “Arsenal” manufacturing plant idea in recent weeks, teasing announcements about weapons like Barracuda and its “Fury” Collaborative Combat Aircraft that would be made in the state-of-the art factory. It is proceeding from the assumption that the U.S. needs 10 times the number of precision weapons it now has in order to deter China and not “run out of stuff” to shoot in the first few weeks of a major conflict, Anduril chief strategy officer Chris Brose said.

“We’ve been at work on this for a few years,” Brose said. “This is a real system. It is already a part of real programs. It’s flying, and we’re really excited to finally be able to talk more about it publicly.

“The problem that we are seeking to solve here, I think, is a familiar one to many of you, which is America and our allies and partners do not have enough weapons. Period, full stop. And we are not capable of producing the volume of weapons that we’re going to need to establish deterrence against a peer competitor.”

Brose noted wargames that showed that the U.S. runs out of critical munitions in the first few weeks of a conflict.

“Then we struggle, or theoretically would struggle, for a period of years to replenish all the weapons that we expended,” he said. “And I think Ukraine has put that problem in high relief for the past few years on far simpler tactical weapon systems, to say nothing of the larger critical munitions that are going to be so essential for an INDOPACOM scenario.”

Salmon said it’s “unrealistic for us to believe that we will know exactly how many we need to produce 10 years from now,” and factories will have to be able to efficiently “ramp up, and sometimes, you have to ramp down.”

She added Anduril is aiming to reduce parts count, tooling, and complexity and “rely more on commercial components.” The entire work force as a whole won’t be “bespoke to just one single system,” she said.

Brose said every variant of Barracuda “leverages core subsystems which are reusable across the family of systems. These are systems that can be assembled with tools, literally that you probably have in your garage—screwdrivers, pliers, things of that sort, 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. It’s been designed with the exact opposite approach, which is, I have to leverage commercial supply chains as much as possible. I have to make the weapon as simple to produce and as simple to assemble as possible.”

All three variants are flying now, Salmon said.

“These are things that we’re actively working on day-to-day,” she said.

[Minowski(김유철)]

뭔가 좋은 말은 다 써있는데........... 비슷한 이야기했던 것 중 뒷통수를 후드려맞은 프로젝트가 T7이라던가 생각나네요..

[위종민]

전시 아닌 이상 평시의 순항미사일 생산량은 기껏해야 수십, 수백 발인데 가격이 낮으면 이익율도 낮아지고 주주들은 회사 경영진을 성토하고...

[ssn688]

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/01/lessons-from-iranian-houthi-attacks-on-ships-in-the-red-sea/
9 Lessons from Iranian and Houthi Attacks on Ships in the Red Sea
2. Low cost simplified cruise missiles
Iran was able to reverse engineer the Russian Kh-55 (AS-15 KENT) air launched cruise missile. Following this a simplified and scaled down version was built which could use a commercial turbojet engine similar to those in model aircraft.
This approach is different from Western countries which tend to buy very few, yet expensive, cruise missiles.
(먼 산)

[위종민]

매년 수 십 발을 훈련용으로 쏘고 그만큼을 구매해야 하는 건가 싶은데, 이러면 또 납세자들이 가만있질 않고 ㅋㅋ