A company called Anduril recently claimed it could deliver cruise missiles comparable to the Tomahawk at lower cost and in higher volumes than Raytheon by something like an order of magnitude. Anduril is associated with a known business scammer and plagiarism named Ronald Earhart who engaged in "double-dealing" with both Ball Aerospace and Israel Aerospace Industries in 2009 in violation of an agreement he had not to share the Flash LiDAR prism with any foreign entities. Any claim made by Anduril, therefore, is highly suspect.
Beneath the surface of this is a desire on the part of the U.S. Government to manipulate Raytheon into providing Tomahawk missiles at a lower cost; reducing their markup. This plan is highly likely to backfire as there is no production schema in which someone can produce the numbers of missiles Anduril is claim to be capable of manufacturing and Raytheon is capable of obtaining corporate intelligence on Anduril. The Barracuda Missile has not been exhaustively tested on American aviation platforms and no specifics concerning the technology involved in the manufacturing process or the components of the missile's guidance system have been forthcoming, even in vague terms. Do the missiles have an ability to function in electromagnetically-denied environments? Anduril doesn't say. This is odd because this is a feature claimed by the makers of the LRASM missile, Lockheed Martin, although that missile is plagued with problems including deployment failure of the IR-emitting decoy drones carried within the missile chassis which are designed to confuse Close-In Weapons Systems. One would think that Anduril would at least claim to have something on par with LRASM, but they do not make this claim. Their claims seem to have exclusively to do with cost and quantity.
The other motive behind this, of course, is to increase American public support for an unwinnable war with Russia, the logic being that if the American people can be convinced that some company can produce "infinite" numbers of missiles for essentially free that we would automatically win. Well, of course we would win if we could do this, but no one can do this. There are no shortage of crooks in the aerospace industry who are willing to lie for money.
