Allied Command Transformation is co-leading the Wargaming Initiative for NATO 2023, deepening the wargaming knowledge of senior NATO military and civilian officials.
Allied Command Transformation is developing its Audacious Wargaming Capability as part of its effort to better understand the challenges facing the Alliance’s Military Instrument of Power and out-excel potential adversaries through leadership development. It also seeks to enhance engagement and cooperation with stakeholders to refine NATO’s understanding and use of wargaming to enable it to remain at the forefront of warfare development. These efforts will enable NATO to identify opportunities and vulnerabilities that can be leveraged and mitigated, respectively, and foster a wargaming culture across the Alliance.
Allied Command Transformation is co-leading the Wargaming Initiative for NATO 2023, better known as WIN 2023, from June 26-28, 2023 in Rome, Italy. Over the course of this three-day event, the Command’s Wargaming and Experimentation Branch will be working alongside Italy, France, and Germany to expose senior NATO military and civilian officials to future wargaming practices and technologies. The theme of WIN 2023 is ‘Harnessing the Power and Potential of Wargaming,’ to enable NATO’s competitive edge into the future by reinforcing analytical rigor at all levels of decision-making and providing the opportunity to explore threats in a safe-to-fail environment.
This year’s Wargaming Initiative for NATO has over 300 registered participants from across the Alliance, with participation from NATO, Allies, academia, and industry. The core events for WIN 2023 will occur on June 27th and 28th, with plenary sessions taking place about the use of wargaming to enhance the Alliance’s strategic advantage and the use of wargaming to develop better decision-makers in an era of accelerated decision-making, respectively. Other events on these days include wargaming sessions where senior NATO military and civilian officials will experience the benefits of wargaming, as well as exhibitions showcasing wargaming solutions, topics, and capabilities from NATO, academia, and industry.
WIN 2023 provides an important opportunity for Allied Command Transformation to highlight the benefit of wargaming and further the development of national and Alliance wargaming capabilities. It also provides the opportunity to foster a ‘wargaming mindset’ where ideas, plans, or technologies can be tested to failure and learned from, with this learning data being used to inform refinement. As noted by Colonel Nicholas Waldron, Head of the Experimentation and Wargaming Branch, this mindset is imperative to develop, as “Global events over the last year have shown all of us that we need to think differently. We need to challenge paradigms, explore new ideas, and find opportunities. Experimentation and Wargaming are increasingly important tools in NATO’s toolbox that allow us to gain insights before making final decisions. While we certainly will not be able to predict the future, wargames can offer an awareness of possible futures and the implications of that awareness (or lack of). What Allied Command Transformation is doing is really the first step in addressing how the Alliance uses wargaming to shape that future.”
The Wargaming Initiative for NATO began in 2022 as a bilateral initiative between France and Italy, supported by the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, General Philippe Lavigne. It has since evolved into a continuum of events, with Allied Command Transformation co-hosting NATO’s first practitioner-level wargaming conference at King’s College London in May, and conducting WIN 2023 in Rome. The Wargaming Initiative for NATO, in particular, has recently become an annual event, with planning currently ongoing for the next iterations in 2024 and 2025.
Allied Command Transformation’s Experimentation and Wargaming Branch is responsible for the planning, design, conduct, and analysis of experiments and wargames, and aims to leverage these activities to enable NATO’s competitive edge. The experiments undertaken by this Branch seek to gain evidence in support of developing new concepts and capabilities, as well as test and validate these concepts along the development cycle. The Branch also develops and conducts wargames, applying scenario-based models in which the outcome and sequence of events affect, and are affected by the decisions made by the players. Regardless of output type, the Experimentation and Wargaming Branch remains committed to developing partnerships of mutual benefit with the NATO Command and Force Structure, Nations, academia, and industry.