China has obtained the big screen software used by NATO and the United States for war room mapping. Luciad, a defense contractor based in Leuven, Belgium, is selling the Chinese government high performance software used for situational awareness by the military commands of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), according to the South China Morning Post. The package includes LuciadLightspeed, a program that can process real-time data, including that from fast-moving objects, with speed and accuracy. Situational awareness is the ability to know what is happening in a target environment and use that intelligence to defeat the enemy. In warfare, the situation is so fluid it can change in seconds.

Planners use data from sources such as drone feeds, satellite imagery, radar, sensor plots, weather forecasts and platoon status. Traditional software can introduce errors as large as 500 meters in the positioning of moving targets from different data streams. Luciad’s software can analyze data and generate seamless visuals at a speed of 100 calculations a second, 75 times faster than its closest competitor, with accuracy to within 3 cm and on a global scale, according to American graphics technology company Nvidia. This allows planners to visualize and analyze changes in enemy positions or assess target information in real time and adjust mission parameters accordingly, according to Nvidia.

The same software is used by the United States Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, where covert missions for the U.S. government. Under Chinese law, a foreign vendor supplying software to the Chinese government must disclose every line of source code to authorities for a security check. It was unclear whether Luciad has complied with that requirement. The company did not respond to requests for comment, the South China Morning Post reports.

Luciad was established by Dr Lode Missiaen, a senior scientist who had worked at the Nato Consultation, Command and Control Agency in The Hague, the Netherlands, in the 1990s. He left NATO and founded Luciad in 1999 to develop commercial software which was adopted by NATO in 2008. The company was bought last year by Hexagon, a technology group based in Sweden, which has established ties with the Chinese military and defense industry.