Anduril and Zone 5 Technologies advance for Air Force, DIU Enterprise Test Vehicle

Anduril’s Barracuda 500. (Anduril)

AFA WARFARE 2025 — The Air Force and Defense Innovation Unit have selected Anduril Industries and Zone 5 Technologies to advance in a program to develop a modular, low-cost air vehicle that can help pave the way for a new generation of weapons.

The two companies will now proceed under the Enterprise Test Vehicle (ETV) program, which was originally envisioned to field an affordable testbed for subsystems and is now poised to serve as a foundation for a new weapon. The Defense Innovation Unit confirmed to Breaking Defense Tuesday that Anduril and Zone 5 Technologies have been selected to continue, meaning competitors from the program’s previous round, Leidos Dynetics and Integrated Solutions for Systems, have been axed.

Anduril touted its recently unveiled Barracuda-500 cruise missile in a press release Tuesday announcing the company’s selection to continue, which states that “[o]ver the next several months, Anduril will produce a number of ETV Barracuda-500 units using manufacturing processes and equipment that are representative of future full rate production techniques, continuing development towards a production variant capable of rapidly scalable manufacture in 2026.” The company declined to comment on how much funding it has received under the ETV effort. 

Zone 5 Technologies confirmed to Breaking Defense that the company has been selected to advance. The vendors who were not picked to proceed did not respond to a request for comment.

In a briefing with reporters Monday on the sidelines of the AFA Warfare Symposium, Anduril Senior Director of Advanced Effects Steve Milano explained that while the previous ETV phase demonstrated the ability to manufacture a platform with open systems architecture, integrate subsystems and fly it, the next phase aims to “iterate” on the platform’s design. Additionally, the next ETV phase is anticipated to incorporate autonomous networking and last about six months.

Barracuda is designed to launch from a range of platforms, and an early application of ETV is for a missile that can be dropped out the back of a cargo plane. After the next phase of the ETV program concludes, the effort can transition into the Franklin Affordable Mass Missile (FAMM) program for palletized munitions, Milano explained. 

Following an earlier phase that proved it was possible to integrate mission systems without extensive redesign activities and fly a vehicle, “the next instantiation is a formalized requirement to go after a capability set, and that capability set is answered by a program of record called FAMM,” Milano said. 

A parallel effort called Extended Range Attack Munition has been formed to develop an ETV vehicle for foreign military sales, primarily to aid Ukraine — though military assistance for Kyiv has now been paused. 

Lockheed’s ‘CMMT’

In a separate briefing with reporters Monday morning, Lockheed Martin revealed its own cruise missile news. After previously teasing the concept, the company unveiled its Common Multi-Mission Truck (CMMT), pronounced “comet,” that aims to answer the Pentagon’s call for cheaper and easily produced weapons. 

According to Mike Rothstein, Lockheed’s vice president of strategy and requirements for air weapons and sensors, the CMMT is designed to be an “upper subsonic” air vehicle with a range of “multiple hundreds of miles,” adding that larger variants can travel “upwards to 1,000-ish miles.” Besides features like scalability, the platform was also designed to more easily incorporate different payloads like warheads or sensors.

Rothstein said the CMMT “fits very well inside [FAMM]” effort, and that the company was aiming to meet unit cost goals under the program of $150,000 per round. According to a Lockheed press release, the weapon comes in two air-launched variants: one configuration can deploy from airlifters, fighters and bombers, while a smaller version can act as a launched effect from rotary aircraft.

“Part of our concept is to make the manufacturing easily deployable, easily repeatable, whether it’s different places in the United States, whether it’s with international partners, whether it’s in theaters closer to war,” Rothstein said. “These are all things we get from listening to our customer.”