NATO's C2 centre chief on AI and lessons from Ukraine

As a woman with a physics degree, Colonel Mietta Groeneveld knows she's not what people might expect in a military leader.

She sees her unique perspective as an advantage that she applies to her role as director of the NATO Command and Control Centre of Excellence (C2 CoE) – and to defence technology as a whole.

“Ask any kind of AI to picture somebody in the military, they will come up with this picture of a very strong man with a weapon running through a forest, or somebody in a fighter jet,” she tells The Stack during a conversation at the 2026 ESET World conference in Berlin.

But, she says the reality of the armed forces now is that "only a very small percentage will still need those physical skills. The majority [of people] are used for their very broad ways of thinking.”