Helping troops armed with rifles, drones, mounted machine guns, and even grenade and rocket launchers identify and lock onto targets more easily — that's the basic mission of US company AimLock, which has been developing automated targeting products for over a decade.

At SOF Week 2025, the company's CEO, Bryan Bockmon, told Business Insider about how the company is now focusing on autonomous weapons systems that may be crucial for future warfare, systems made for defeating drones. Countering drones is an expanding area of research and development, with a lot of work being done in Ukraine, though that isn't the only country where this technology is being developed.

The Ukraine war has shown that electronic warfare like signal jamming and GPS spoofing can be effective when it comes to defeating enemy drones, but having a kinetic option, the ability to shoot it, as a last resort for destroying those systems is essential should other options fail.

And they may fail because some drones, like the fiber-optic drones becoming more common in Ukraine or AI-enabled systems, for instance, are resistant to electronic warfare.

"If that doesn't work," Bockmon said of electronic warfare, then "this is the last line of defense."

Defeating drones

With electronic warfare, signal jamming, and GPS spoofing, kinetic systems are a last line of drone defense. AimLock

AimLock's autonomous counter-drone systems are made to detect classify, and track uncrewed aerial systems and then decide on the best firing solution for taking them out.

One of the AimLock counter-UAS systems was on display at SOF Week in Tampa, Florida. Bockmon said that the system was invulnerable to signal jamming and other elements of electronic warfare because it relies on visual navigation and autonomous terminal guidance.

"We develop autonomy that's specialized for weapons integration," the CEO said, explaining that the autonomy is in finding targets, aiming, tracking, and engagement, or actually firing the weapon at the target.

What makes AimLock's development approach interesting is that "instead of making specialized systems that then have to be reinvented 10 times over to cover the entire mission need," Bockmon said, it makes "generalized modules that can be adapted across 10 different missions."

Counter-UAS systems are at the forefront of industry conversations right now as DoD pushes for more capabilities. AimLock

So if the warfighter needs a different sensor or weapon system, it can find an AimLock product to match. It reduces the development cycle, the CEO said, lowering costs and simplifying the process.

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The company's Core Targeting Module, or CTM, as it's called, is at the heart of AimLock's systems. It combines autonomy and firing and targeting components to improve the speed and precision of weapons from guns to uncrewed systems.

The CTM hardware is, in some cases, just a small black box with a few plug-in outlets on top.

Bockmon said the modularity of it and other weapons systems AimLock makes allows it "to offer new solutions that can adapt at the pace of combat," whether that is a low-intensity fight or a high-intensity great power conflict in remote or contested environments with limited communications.

While the company has been working to refine all of this for years, its current focus is its counter-drone systems.

AimLock's technology focuses on finding, tracking, and identifying targets before assisting with precision firing. AimLock

Counter-drone technology has been growing in importance for years now with electronic warfare, directed energy (lasers), and other developments all aimed at defeating uncrewed systems, but the technology is becoming critical as drones, especially small, inexpensive drones, become more prolific. The Pentagon unveiled its new counter-UAS strategy to address these issues last year, but there's a lot of work to be done to meet the threat.

"We finished our first counter-UAS systems back in 2018," Bockmon explained to BI, "and they had to sit on the shelves for a long time because it was really about how effective will electronic warfare be in the future, and then how quickly will it be defeated." It wasn't clear initially how effective electronic warfare would be, but it's clear now that it's not infallible.

The counter-drone mission was a big topic at SOF Week 2025. Multiple defense industry exhibitors and special operations officials spoke to the growing need for a variety of solutions to defeat hostile drones. The Defense Department has made developing a military-wide strategy for countering drones a top priority.