NATO: “Women are better at wargaming than men”

“Women are better at wargaming than men,” said NATO on Monday.

It was a punchy post to make ahead of an incoming US administration that is hostile to what it sees as “woke” politics, existentially ill-disposed to NATO*, and which one august publication described as “wooing the bro.” 

Yet NATO Allied Command Transformation chose to inform those on X receptive to such messages this week, that it is “operationalizing this expertise by integrating gender perspectives into warfare development.”

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NATO ACT – which leads the alliance’s strategic warfare development command – said these “gender perspectives" were being integrated “through innovative wargaming, simulations and training solutions.”

ACT posted after hosting the 2024 “Gender Advisor Annual Conference” and the first wargaming session led by its “Gender Advisor Office”. 

The organisation has long been keen to ensure more women join NATO’s cybersecurity among other functions. (Across the alliance, an average of 12.5% of armed forces are women, according to its most recent dataset.)

NATO runs a range of wargames, gender-focused and otherwise, including this year’s “WIN24” which focused on all five warfare domains (air, maritime, land, space and cyber) and its  “Locked Shields” cyber exercise – photos of which betray an industry-standard predominance of chaps.

Wargaming can be across domains from cyber to space. Women are under-represented in both. As a 2023 paper from the Institute for Defense Analysis put it: “One reason women are typically underrepresented in wargaming is that they may not be introduced to gaming in the first place. 

“Experience in the military and in hobby wargaming are indicators that a person may be more likely to participate in professional wargaming, but women are underrepresented in both these populations.

Women are often overlooked or automatically excluded from wargame teams even when they have comparable levels of experience as men. When women seek out opportunities in professional wargaming, they can be given secondary roles such as note-taking or data collection rather than roles directly related to wargame design and adjudication” – IDA.

So are women “better” at wargaming than men? NATO didn’t cite a source. It may have been referring to a 2006 study that found, in short:

“In experimental wargames: (i) people are overconfident about their expectations of success; (ii) those who are more overconfident are more likely to attack; (iii) overconfidence and attacks are more pronounced among males than females”

A June 2024 paper, “Military Voices on the Gender Perspective” from NATO meanwhile added: “The conflict in Ukraine is one of the most technologically advanced patterns of warfare to date. The Russians are using deep-fakes to disrupt social resilience and weaken the willpower to fight, transmitting gender disinformation, using civilian technology and applications such as dating sites as geo-locational tactics, and using manipulation and propaganda tactics to shape the gendered narrative and attack female politicians in order to influence public opinion and weaken democratic institutions."

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Among other areas of focus for NATO is an ongoing drive to ensure greater interoperability, including across information technology.

This summer the alliance ran its largest ever Coalition Warrior Interoperability exercise n Poland, backed by over 100 staff from the alliance’s Communications and Information Agency who provided engineering expertise “from networking to software engineering" and more recently in October 2024 ran its "Steadfast Duel" exercise.

This "tests the integration of secure communication networks and data-sharing capabilities between NATO Command and Force Structures, ensuring seamless interoperability across all domains, including cyberspace" with a report on that making a rare reference to "Orion, an NCIA-customized space-related information management system, used to request and exchange space-related data and information."

Photographs of that exercise show a woman in every picture.

*Secretary for defense nominee Pete Hegseth described the alliance disparagingly in his 2020 book American Crusade, writing: “Nato is not an alliance; it’s a defense arrangement for Europe, paid for and underwritten by the United States".

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