📺Alex Garland's Warfare: Military Propaganda for the Other Side
Alex Garland's brisk, intense Warfare depicts a single (true) day of operation in Iraq during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi in real-time. It reads like hyperrealistic military propaganda - following the standard model of ingratiating you with a platoon of young men, before subjecting them to horrific circumstances followed by a miraculous recovery. The text of the film contains this but beneath the surface is a demonstration of the fragility of even the elite Navy SEALs and (as war flicks often are) a well-rounded metaphor for the Iraq War as a whole. I believe the film to contain a playbook on how to dismantle an American military outpost.
The film begins with a brutal home invasion, "I like that house, I want it" - two families confined to a bedroom as platoon Alpha One takes control of their home, converting it into a surveillance base and shortly thereafter a warzone. This is depicted with neutrality, neither cultivating a sense of the necessity of this operation, nor gratuitiously moralizing about the state of the family. It just is. Now established, the Americans watch, anxious, sweating, taking constant notes - as a market across the street bustles with mundane life. Civilians (Jihadis???) sit and have tea, smoke cigarettes and banter, living relaxed under the tense glare of a sniper scope. It looks very hard to be an American and very easy to be a local. The watchful Americans note each time they are "peeked" and "probed" by the neighbourhood, as suspected insurgents scope out their ill-gotten base of operations.
It is at this point early on you may be prompted with questions - why did the Americans take this building? Why do they need to be here? What are they surveilling? An irony hits you that they are surveilling the insurgents preparing for an attack on a building they stole from the local civilians. They have created the conditions for warfare by seizing a property in the middle of a neighbourhood, and are now surveilling the mounting threat they themselves have created. Warfare doesn't answer any questions about purpose, leaving every resultant movement, bullet and horror ultimately self-inflicted. We can assume there's some grand purpose1, but for these soldiers and these civilians this is a home invasion story.
This home invasion under cover of night is soon juxtaposed against the insurgent response - speakers ring out warning the local population to evacuate the area in anticipation of attack. The only civilians who cannot leave are those held hostage by Alpha One. The conflict kicks off with a grenade dropped into the hole of a sniper nest, concussing three soldiers, injuring one badly enough that they require a CASEVAC (casualty evacuation) delivered via Bradley. When the Bradley arrives the team step out, point held by an unwilling translator, into an IED, leaving him in pieces and two more soldiers badly injured. The Bradley flees "too fucked up" to return. Air support by this point has been pulled elsewhere and Alpha One are left blind - on a level playing field with the insurgents.
As a hack-fraud, I pay attention to a few things I assume to be important in films, the opening shot (the boys vibing to a softcore pornographic music video - Eric Prydz's "Call on Me" making them hornily human), the closing shot (more on this later), and when something happens three times. Three times Alpha One requests a "Show of Force", amounting to a military jet flying low enough to concuss everyone in the neighbourhood, including the Americans. They demand one now, and the insurgents briefly retreat from the display of absolute technological air superiority. But it's just that, a show. A substanceless performance of power. They do not actually have air support2, and by the 2nd and 3rd "Show of Force" the insurgents cease reacting, they know it's a paper plane. Meanwhile each flyby concusses the already traumatized platoon, leaving them in a hazy disassociation and unable to provide each other adequate medical care - one fumbles a morphine injector, accidentally stabbing himself in the hand, another is shaking too badly to use a tourniquet and instead presses his knee into a screaming injured man's gaping thigh wound to try and stem the bleeding.
Three times we see the infrastructure of military supremacy utterly fail in the face of real violence - careful details taken in notes become worthlessly forgotten from the first concussion, leading them unable to relay critical details about their location, "Just follow the blood and smoke!", to their radios. The basic logistics of which side of the door the Bradley's will arrive is repeated multiple times, often with confusion, and the communications specialist eventually rips their headphones out of the radio overwhelmed with chatter. They dress themselves in coordination and attachment to American military supremacy but they are painfully vulnerable.
Occasionally this borders on the comical - the first Bradley arrives after one soldier is concussed, bleeding slightly. When the IED goes off, further support is denied - they're willing to send armor for a papercut but not multiple severely wounded. Eventually an insubordinate officer pretends to be the CO to trick the bureaucratic military structure into sending their previous material into the field to save their lives. Near the climax of the film, the Officer-in-Charge realizes, to his horror, that "gear" has been left out in the street at the sire of the IED. He prepares multiple men to provide him covering fire as he rushes out into the open street, risking life and limb for... a single hammer. No one questions for a moment if this is sensible. I am sure there is an explanation - we saw its utility earlier in breaking through a wall to seize the upstairs apartment - but it's not offered in the film. We just see a man risk his life for a hammer moments after the Military will not risk an APC for his platoon.
We rarely see the insurgents, almost all incoming fire comes from shadowed windows, brief glimpses of material dipping back below balcony walls, and the occasional thermal-outline silhouette crumpling under observation from air. They are dehumanized, but not in the way I'd normally expect - they are a community, a town, a neighbourhood immune response rejecting the infestation. Interspersing occasional extreme violence with lengthy periods of "Showing Force". No American gets hit with a bullet, and one of the few moments we see an insurgent up close is a point of view shot of them spraying their AK47 one handed and wildly. You realize they are not shooting to kill, they are sweeping the street with bullets as a threat display to push the Americans back. By comparison, the trained SEALs snap their precision aim moment to moment, looking to put down potential threats. You realize in this moment that what is generally portrayed as poor training is actually the precise same effect the Americans attempt to generate with their low-ground flybys - a "Show of Force". Deploying excessive performative violence in the hopes of not needing to commit it to achieve the effect.
The film reaches a stable equilibrium where both sides generally fail to do much of anything to each other, just repeatedly force retreats from positions bombarded with arms fire. Alpha One requests a Bradley sweep on the top floor of their building as insurgents begin to cross the rooftops to invade their position. Again we see threat displays of American firepower with no casualties, just noise. It becomes something of a performance, a dance battle, as each side presents their respective capacity for terrifying violence - but eventually the Americans lose, requesting a full evacuation and leaving the home, Bradleys fleeing over the dismembered body of their translator.
The final moments of the film present its message quite clearly, I think. A smoking street, an Iraqi translator in bloody pieces, and quiet. The family, once held hostage, stumbles out of their ruined home, as insurgents step out into the street cautiously, limply holding their weapons. None of them say anything, they just look around, confused. They seem to be asking the same question as the audience - "What the fuck was all that about?". It's depicted comically, I laughed out loud at the sudden turn from deeply troubling realistic depictions of pain and violence, followed by the cinematic equivalent of a shepherd's crook yanking someone off stage. It is a clear metaphor for the war as a whole - a short sharp shock of unexplainable pointless violence.
When I stepped out I had one thought - the entire coordinated apparatus of the American military - rifles, snipers, MGs, jets, Bradleys, training, communication, eyes in the sky, mettle - was ejected by about a dozen guys with guns and a couple bombs. It appeared to me like a demonstration of fragility, of a clear signal towards the power of community. It depicted this microcosm of the war as a psychological battle between a well coordinated, rigid-structure, hypervigilant military and a neighbourhood watch. One that benefitted from their local knowledge, their access to community and their commitment to ejecting unwanted intruders. The film repeatedly demonstrates genuinely awe-inspiring moments of military supremacy, you feel the concussive weight of low flying jets, the god-like omniscience of aerial observation, the invulnerability of the armored Bradleys. Yet they were bested by a community with small arms and a single IED. They utterly collapsed.
As a follow up from Civil War, I do get the sense that Alex Garland is deliberating on something, perhaps offering some hopefulness that untrained civilians can repel unwanted invaders regardless of their military power projection. This is a true story told from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground. It's a story of catastrophic loss, failure and retreat.3
I agree that Warfare is military propaganda, but it's for the other side.
Footnotes (Context from a helpful Military Expert)
Context: "The purpose of forward deploying these seal teams, was actually to assess the strength of a local insurgency so what you see as the ironic "force generating resistance" loop, that's actually the strategy...basically, these SOP groups were being used to bait out local resistance"↩
Context: "Something like the F-15C (which I believe did those passes) literally has no tools to engage ground targets, it has no sensors for that, its only weapons are air-to-air weapons...so they might do low altitude high-speed passes to basically make the enemy think air support is in theater"↩
Context: "This is all downstream of a more fundamental problem that is often missed outside the defence community. Ultimately, there are national traditions and strategies to wage war, and even national theories on what war is. Even across the west, the French have a fundamentally different approach to winning wars than we do, and so on. The "American Way of War" is best describe as an effort to annihilate the enemies productive capacity to generate wartime inputs, this is done by targeting dual-use industry (industry with military + civil outputs), military industry, military infastructure, stockpiles of equipment, and concentrations of military leadership + force. There's this theory emerging in the US Civil War when Sherman burns the industry of the south, and it's advanced over the next 125 years accross various wars, especially in WW2, where Strategic Airpower, not US boots, led to Japans surrender (in this narrative, the Soviet Union would disagree). The "American Way of War" has fundamentally no answer to counter insurgency, and Officers trained in this approach simply did not know how to respond to the occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan. Its great at toppling states, look at how long it took Saddam to fall, but it fundamentally fails in this ."↩