Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa (PGZ) and Anduril Industries have signed a cooperative agreement to build the surface-launched Barracuda-500M cruise missile in Bydgoszcz, Poland, announced on 6 July 2026 at a ceremony attended by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Minister of National Defence Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz. The deal converts a memorandum of understanding from October into a production program under which PGZ and Anduril will build thousands of the missiles for the Polish Armed Forces.
The partnership establishes one of Europe’s first large-scale production lines for low-cost, mass-produced cruise missiles. It also reshapes the production site, Wojskowe Zakłady Lotnicze Nr 2 (WZL-2), a Bydgoszcz plant that has spent decades overhauling Soviet-era aircraft rather than manufacturing new autonomous weapons.
The Barracuda-500M belongs to a family of turbojet-powered cruise missiles that Anduril unveiled in September 2024, designed to be produced by the thousand rather than the dozen. The airframe sits between a conventional cruise missile and a one-way attack drone. Anduril says each round takes 50 percent less time to build, with 95 percent fewer tools and 50 percent fewer parts than competing weapons.
Anduril lists the Barracuda-500M with a range beyond 500 nautical miles, roughly 900 kilometres, and a payload above 100 pounds. Kosiniak-Kamysz described the weapon as a cruise missile that is “precise, resistant to electronic warfare, fast and inexpensive to produce”.
Anduril targets a unit price of roughly $200,000 to $216,000, between a seventh and a fifteenth of a Tomahawk or JASSM-ER. It builds the missile from about 70 percent commercial components on a production cycle as short as 30 hours. Its Lattice autonomy software lets rounds coordinate as swarms and share targeting data, a design meant to saturate air defences rather than evade them one shot at a time.
The Polish line follows a framework agreement Washington reached with Anduril in May 2026 to scale production of the surface-launched variant. The wider aim, as European states build out deep-strike capacity, is to replace small inventories of scarce, expensive standoff weapons with cheaper rounds that can be fired and replenished through a prolonged war.
For Poland, the first country in Europe to sign such an agreement with Anduril, the localization is also a route into European funding. PGZ and Anduril intend to raise Polish and European content in phases toward a majority European-made product that would qualify under the European Union’s Security Action for Europe, or SAFE.
The €150 billion instrument requires that no more than 35 percent of a funded system’s component costs originate outside the EU, the European Economic Area or Ukraine. Because Anduril is a United States firm, only deep production inside Poland can bring the Barracuda under that cap and free European buyers from any third-country restriction on the weapon’s use or re-export.
The Barracuda deal sits within a global turn toward cheap, mass-produced cruise missiles that Quwa has tracked across several programs, from Pakistan’s Fatah series to Ukrainian and British efforts. Britain has flight-tested three low-cost deep-strike weapons for Ukraine, and Poland’s WZL-2 now joins that shift.
Key details of the Polish-built missile remain open. PGZ told reporters in November 2025 that the Barracuda-500M’s specifications were still to be determined, and formal procurement is expected to follow through national channels once requirements and localization targets are set.
