One Game Can’t Answer the Arctic Question: Inside NATO’s Bet on Multi-Level Wargaming

Militaries have tried for decades to build a wargaming framework that links the strategic, operational, and tactical levels into one coherent picture. It has never scaled. Every attempt runs into the same wall of cost, time, and the sheer burden of coordination needed to get the right people in the right rooms at the right moments. That wall is now cracking.

For the first time, lower barriers to entry for simulation technology and the rapid incorporation of artificial intelligence have opened a path to a multi-level wargaming framework. The world operates in a widening gray zone, one that some experts call the opening phase of World War III, in which understanding how the levels of war connect is no longer optional. A framework that can do that, both at an affordable cost and repeatable, is what NATO Systems Activities Concept-219 High North Scenarios for Wargaming and Analysis (NATO SAC-219) is betting it can build.

Using Arctic and High North simulations as its testing bed, NATO SAC-219 will build and stress-test a methodology that integrates the strategic, operational, and tactical levels into one. The goal is to weave together technologies across these levels to produce methods of analysis, foresight, modeling and simulation, and wargaming that can be reused in future studies. The High North is an ideal gray-zone proving ground: undersea cables damaged in the Baltic without clear attribution, influence operations targeting Greenland’s political debates, GPS jamming across the Nordic region, and a steady probing of Svalbard’s legal status. Whether these acts mark the beginning of a deadlier era, or they are acts of hybrid warfare in and of themselves, they are testing NATO’s ability to recognize, attribute, and respond to aggression that arrives in pieces. Understanding how those pieces connect across all three levels of war is precisely what single-focus wargaming has struggled to map.

The project’s 105-plus-member team, drawn from 21 nations, ran the first phase of this methodology from June 9–12 at Oxford Brookes University. Initially focusing on strategic-level questions, the group met to surface the underlying assumptions about NATO capabilities that will get built into combined strategic, operational, and tactical wargames at the group’s August meeting.

ExpertTheory’s Providence platform hosted both games, which condensed months of research into two playable wargames in less than a week. The wargames, run with a white cell adjudicating, blue teams representing NATO and Allied actors, and red teams representing the adversary, asked whether hybrid actions short of outright war could still tip the High North into a war of aggression. NATO does not have easy answers for that problem. With unforgiving terrain, a thinner Allied presence, and the legal status of parts of the region genuinely contested, the Arctic escalation ladder scarcely resembles the ones NATO has studied in other theaters. Mapping that ladder is exactly what the week’s games set out to do.

The first game, “Compatriots Unleashed – Svalbard Crisis,” tested how NATO might respond to simultaneous Russian hybrid actions in Svalbard and Estonia. Almost immediately, Russia’s red team went after the Alliance’s comparatively exposed Nordic and Baltic flank, aiming to fracture NATO cohesion while staying below the Article 5 threshold. The second simulation, “The Cut Off,” was a resource-denial scenario, with China imposing export controls on critical minerals for NATO’s defense suppliers and Russia sabotaging multiple European gas pipelines. In both games, the Providence platform tracked every move the teams made, while participants logged every question asked and assumption made about NATO, national, and competitor capabilities — the raw material for the structured analysis to come.

The assumptions from that game will drive the next phase: how the group folds in additional platforms and starts working through the action-reaction-counteraction cycle that turns one scenario into an actual system. The plan for the coming years is to run more wargames on more platforms, mixing qualitative judgment with quantitative modeling, and combining systems to map all of it across the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.

Oxford was a single step in a much longer build, but it demonstrated that the path to affordable, scalable multi-level wargaming is finally clear. It took several months of research to shape these two scenarios, and less than a week to build and run them on a single platform. Still, getting the games running was the easy part. Linking the levels of war together and turning separate streams of qualitative and quantitative analysis into something a commander could use is the work still ahead.

For most of wargaming’s history, the ambition to integrate methods into one framework outran the means to build it. But what can a connected system of games do that no single game ever could? SAC-219 has three years to find out. And if it succeeds, its method could help the Alliance wargame — at every level, in every theater that comes next.