20 years later, the Marine Corps can still learn from Fallujah

Twenty years ago, on Nov. 7, 2004, a coalition assault force of more than 15,000 troops, mostly Marines, launched a massive attack on the city of Fallujah, Iraq.

Over the next seven weeks they would retake the city, capturing or killing as many as 2,000 insurgents who had controlled the stronghold since April 2004 following the killing and mutilation of four private U.S. security contractors.

But the coalition and Marines did not fight through long days and nights unscathed. The Second Battle of Fallujah — known as Operation Phantom Fury — was the most intense urban fighting of the Iraq War, more even than the initial surge into Baghdad during the 2003 invasion.

The estimated population of Fallujah in 2004 was fewer than 300,000 residents. All but 30,000 fled the city ahead of the fight. Baghdad, meanwhile, had a population of more than 5.7 million.

In the bloody street-by-street, house-by-house fighting, 82 U.S. troops died and another 600 were wounded. Fallujah marked the most intense urban fighting the Marine Corps had seen since the Battle of Hue during the Vietnam War.

And though the November 2004 battle is considered a success, the city would fall approximately a decade later to Islamic State fighters, who held the city until 2016 when they were defeated by Iraqi-led coalition forces.

Today, two decades after Marines entered the hornet’s nest, Fallujah is regarded for its ferocity and the lessons it yields for Marines in a future urban fight. And in 2023, the Navy laid the keel for the future amphibious assault ship Fallujah, named in honor of the Marines who fought in the battle.

“Fallujah has come to represent Iraq to the Marine Corps,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel who now serves as a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Politics, media and social media

Public attention and political pressure were major factors in both the first — in the spring of 2004 — and second battles of Fallujah, as calls at the time for more aggressive operations sounded from Washington.

That push resulted in Marines, who had only been in the Fallujah area for two weeks prior to the spring operation, being rushed into the city without proper planning, resources or training.

Marines took the subsequent five months to refit, redistribute and coordinate before launching the second large-scale assault on the city.

Also modified was media coverage of the war. During the first battle the Marines did not include embedded reporters, which allowed insurgents to propagandize anything coming out of the fight to garner outside support. In the second battle of Fallujah, however, the Marines embedded as many as 60 reporters with units to highlight the atrocities being committed by insurgents.

Getting the U.S. side of the fighting out through the media, Cancian said, helped ease pressure on politicians and allowed military leaders to conduct the operation.

Since that time, development of new technology that favors urban defenders, the presence of social media and real-time evolution of urban combat in Gaza and Ukraine have raised the stakes for how the Marine Corps, and the U.S. military as a whole, prepares for another urban fight.

Today’s constant stream of online video, such as battlefield footage regularly posted from Ukraine and Gaza, allows for a flood of disinformation, which could again ratchet up pressure on civilian leadership.

“The Marines were trying to move into Fallujah, a pretty bloody and destructive battle that was on TV. Political leadership blinked and told the Marine Corps to stand down,” Cancian said. “If we’re ever in this situation where you get these images of destruction and death day after day, that creates a backlash and we’re seeing that in Gaza.”

While military leaders today might plan for such challenges with political leaders, Cancian is skeptical if that will even help.

“I say that because politics is a very short term, immediate game,” Cancian said.

He’s not alone in his thinking.

Retired Army Maj. John Spencer, a leading expert on urban warfare who fought in battles in Iraq in 2003 and the Siege of Sadr City in 2008, co-authored a case study of the battle for the Modern War Institute. The study captures the demands of the fight, which still might differ from what an urban, peer adversary fight would look like today.

A single Marine tank company in Fallujah, for example, fired 1,600 main gun rounds, 121,000 7.62mm machine gun rounds and nearly 50,000 .50-caliber machine gun rounds. Most of their targets were within 200 yards.

One Marine weapons company reported that, on a daily basis, each of its six assault teams used an average of six satchel charges, three cases of Bangalore torpedoes and 10 shoulder-launched weapons.

Over the course of the battle, coalition forces fired more than 4,000 artillery rounds, dropped 318 aerial bombs and fired 391 rockets to support ground troops in the city.

Those munitions figures align with Canadian Army doctrine, which estimates urban operations consume four times the amount of ammunition, according to the case study. The same doctrine shows that such fighting can create three to six times the number of casualties and require nearly three times the amount of water and rations per soldier than operations in other terrain.

Lance Cpl. Chris Lowe was one of the Marines in Fallujah and saw firsthand the effects of those rounds, bombs and rockets.

Lowe, then 20 years old, served as a warehouse clerk but was assigned to a security detail with the 5th Marine Regiment’s bomb technicians. He manned machine guns and automatic grenade launchers as bomb techs blasted Improvised Explosive Devices and other hazards all over the city’s cluttered battlefield.

“You’re bound to come across carnage, particularly in our line of work — it happens,” he told Marine Corps Times.

The post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury that Lowe experienced surfaced after the fight, he said, mostly when he got home.

He struggled over the ensuing years, eventually leaving the Marine Corps in 2016. For more than 14 years Lowe has been working with a case manager at the Semper Fi and America’s Fund, which has provided him neurological fitness training and financial assistance.

Despite his post-war struggles, when Lowe looks back on that harrowing experience, he wants people to know how much the battle meant to those who fought it.

“The time spent there, the blood, sweat and tears and even laughter — because there were a lot of really good times, good camaraderie — those memories are going to last forever,” he said. “The best I can do is live for those who cannot come back.”

Preparing for the next Fallujah

Both Spencer and Cancian told Marine Corps Times that they don’t see much preparation in the Marine Corps or the Army when it comes to facing another Fallujah.

“There was a massive battle in the hospital in the first days,” Spencer said. “The enemy [was set up] in a hospital. But I don’t think you could repeat Fallujah II today, based on social media.”

Since the 2004 battle, both commercial and military technology have advanced. Everything from target-recognition software to commercial drones are now accessible to any nation and non-state actors.

But if a future urban fight arises, the Marines will be without one critical tool — tanks. Former Commandant Gen. David Berger discarded tanks from the Marine Corps inventory in 2021.

In the Modern War Institute case study, authors noted that, in the early days of fighting, an armor-backed task force maneuvered through the city rapidly while dismounted Marines stalled following a breach failure.

Cancian argued that, prior to the Marine Corps Force Design changes, which eliminated tanks, the service should have at least preserved an enhanced battalion of six armor companies.

Berger said at the time that if the Marines need armor in the future, the Army can be relied upon.

But both Cancian and Spencer doubt that pairing the two will be that easy.

For one, Spencer said, integrating infantry and armor requires training. Without regular work between Marine infantry units and Army tankers, there’s not much practice.

Spencer noted that time also plays a factor.

Russia’s early struggles in urban fighting in Ukraine came in part from the brief buildup to the invasion, he said. In Gaza, Hamas fighters had decades to lay their defenses.

“The lesson is, if you give them the time to prepare it’s going to be a lot harder to take the city or do it without destruction,” Spencer said.

It’s unlikely the U.S. will have a first go at an urban battle against an adversary such as Russia or China and be able to reset for five months before launching another operation, he said.

Spencer has long advocated, as a partial solution, for both the Army and Marine Corps to create permanent urban training centers, expert staff, training manuals and better gear.

That wide-reaching resolution may not be as feasible with current military priorities and spending, however. Still, adding urban combat planning into military education and pushing leaders to dedicate a portion of their regular training to that environment are good first steps, he said.

But in 2020, the Marines canceled what was supposed to be a five-year-long experiment on urban technology and tactics in favor of developing new formations for its anticipated naval role in the Pacific.

“The Marine Corps has essentially moved on strategically from an urban fight and counterinsurgency,” Cancian said.