Some of the deeply held gender biases that we have and we harbour can lead to faulty operational planning sometimes, or incomplete policies. I think we only need to look at missions of the past to see that those are lessons we tended to learn the hard way.
Bringing this forward in the planning process, in terms of building that into policies and operational planning, as opposed to finding stuff out while on mission and then calling that back home to tweak the approach, would be preferable. That would mean, within the force generation process at NATO, already building in some gender requirements and capability asks to make sure that is built in from the very beginning.
Gender analysis is very useful also for identifying early warning indicators. When building links with host communities, as well, I think that the tendency has been towards ignoring women's voices, which leads to an incomplete social picture of the operational context where we send our troops.