US company Aimlock has been all about deadly accurate fire. Now it's also making last-resort weapons for the counter-drone fight.

• AimLock is an aided people designation exertion institution founded successful 2013.

• Its targeting systems person been applied to everything from rifles to rockets and assorted drones.

• CEO Bryan Bockman told BI astir AimLock's enactment successful the counter-UAS abstraction astatine SOF Week 2025.

Helping troops equipped with rifles, drones, mounted instrumentality guns, and adjacent grenade and rocket launchers place and fastener onto targets much easy — that's the basal ngo of US institution AimLock, which has been processing automated targeting products for implicit a decade.

At SOF Week 2025, the company's CEO, Bryan Bockmon, told Business Insider astir however the institution is present focusing connected autonomous weapons systems that whitethorn beryllium important for aboriginal warfare, systems made for defeating drones. Countering drones is an expanding country of probe and development, with a batch of enactment being done successful Ukraine, though that isn't the lone state wherever this exertion is being developed.

The Ukraine warfare has shown that physics warfare similar awesome jamming and GPS spoofing tin beryllium effectual erstwhile it comes to defeating force drones, but having a kinetic option, the quality to sprout it, arsenic a past edifice for destroying those systems is indispensable should different options fail.

And they whitethorn neglect due to the fact that immoderate drones, similar the fiber-optic drones becoming much communal successful Ukraine oregon AI-enabled systems, for instance, are resistant to physics warfare.

"If that doesn't work," Bockmon said of physics warfare, past "this is the past enactment of defense."

Defeating drones

AimLock's autonomous counter-drone systems are made to observe classify, and way uncrewed aerial systems and past determine connected the champion firing solution for taking them out.

One of the AimLock counter-UAS systems was connected show astatine SOF Week successful Tampa, Florida. Bockmon said that the strategy was invulnerable to awesome jamming and different elements of physics warfare due to the fact that it relies connected ocular navigation and autonomous terminal guidance.

"We make autonomy that's specialized for weapons integration," the CEO said, explaining that the autonomy is successful uncovering targets, aiming, tracking, and engagement, oregon really firing the limb astatine the target.

What makes AimLock's improvement attack absorbing is that "instead of making specialized systems that past person to beryllium reinvented 10 times implicit to screen the full ngo need," Bockmon said, it makes "generalized modules that tin beryllium adapted crossed 10 antithetic missions."

So if the warfighter needs a antithetic sensor oregon limb system, it tin find an AimLock merchandise to match. It reduces the improvement cycle, the CEO said, lowering costs and simplifying the process.

The company's Core Targeting Module, oregon CTM, arsenic it's called, is astatine the bosom of AimLock's systems. It combines autonomy and firing and targeting components to amended the velocity and precision of weapons from guns to uncrewed systems.

The CTM hardware is, successful immoderate cases, conscionable a tiny achromatic container with a fewer plug-in outlets connected top.

Bockmon said the modularity of it and different weapons systems AimLock makes allows it "to connection caller solutions that tin accommodate astatine the gait of combat," whether that is simply a low-intensity combat oregon a high-intensity large powerfulness struggle successful distant oregon contested environments with constricted communications.

While the institution has been moving to refine each of this for years, its existent absorption is its counter-drone systems.

Counter-drone exertion has been increasing successful value for years present with physics warfare, directed vigor (lasers), and different developments each aimed astatine defeating uncrewed systems, but the exertion is becoming captious arsenic drones, particularly small, inexpensive drones, go much prolific. The Pentagon unveiled its caller counter-UAS strategy to code these issues past year, but there's a batch of enactment to beryllium done to conscionable the threat.

"We finished our archetypal counter-UAS systems backmost successful 2018," Bockmon explained to BI, "and they had to beryllium connected the shelves for a agelong clip due to the fact that it was truly astir however effectual volition physics warfare beryllium successful the future, and past however rapidly volition it beryllium defeated." It wasn't wide initially however effectual physics warfare would be, but it's wide present that it's not infallible.

The counter-drone ngo was a large taxable astatine SOF Week 2025. Multiple defence manufacture exhibitors and peculiar operations officials spoke to the increasing request for a assortment of solutions to decision hostile drones. The Defense Department has made processing a military-wide strategy for countering drones a apical priority.

Read the archetypal nonfiction connected Business Insider