For more than two decades, BRL-CAD has been the primary solid modeling CAD package used by the U.S.
government to help model military systems. The package has also been used in a wide range of military,
academic, and industrial applications, including the design and analysis of vehicles, mechanical parts, and
architecture. Other uses have included radiation dose planning, medical visualization, terrain modeling,
constructive solid geometry (CSG), modeling concepts, computer graphics education and system performance benchmark testing.

BRL-CAD supports a wide variety of geometric representations, including an extensive set of traditional implicit
"primitive shapes" (such as boxes, ellipsoids, cones, and tori) as well as explicit primitives made from collections
of uniform B-spline surfaces, non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surfaces, n-manifold geometry (NMG), and purely
faceted polygonal mesh geometry.
All geometric objects may be combined using boolean set-theoretic CSG operations such as union, intersection and difference.