The Real Military History Behind the New Iraq War Film 'Warfare'

A24's new action thriller, "Warfare," gives viewers exactly what its title promises: warfare.

The film, based on director and retired Special Warfare Operator First Class Ray Mendoza's real-world experience in the Iraq War, is a gritty, real-time combat action between Navy SEALs and Iraqi insurgents. In order to understand the movie, audiences don't really need to know anything about the context of the battle or the Iraq War: Everything we need to know is happening on the screen. But some might leave the theater shocked by the intensity of the combat depicted and wonder what it was all about.

"Warfare" takes place in Ramadi in 2006, a focal point for insurgent groups in Iraq's al-Anbar Province during the Iraq War. For eight months, thousands of American and British troops fought thousands of militia fighters from various insurgent groups for control of the city. Ramadi and Anbar were "lost," and al-Qaida had a firm grip on the province. It would take a lot of slow, deliberate fighting to restore the region to government control.

"[The action depicted in 'Warfare'] was part of the counterinsurgency mission, which wasn't a SEAL-specific mission. It was the overall objective of policy at that time," Mendoza told Military.com. "It meant taking back sectors of Ramadi and establishing footholds. We would go in as an overwatch element the night before, and we would provide overwatch as they set up a combat outpost.

"The insurgency would try to prevent the combat engineers from setting that up. And so we just cover them really until they set up concertina wire, sandbag windows and whatnot. That's one footprint. And then out of that, we punch out further into a certain sector, so on and so forth."

The most notable (and formidable) enemy forces in Ramadi for much of the fighting in 2006 belonged to al-Qaida in Iraq and its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (who would be killed and replaced that year). The firefight depicted in the film could have happened anywhere in Ramadi, as much of the city was contested throughout the year. Mendoza's sector that day hadn't seen an American presence for months.

"The last time anybody was really there was when Mike Monsoor jumped onto a grenade and was awarded the Medal of Honor, so it was kind of a hotbed within a hotbed of insurgents," said Mendoza. "It was a sector we felt we needed to take back. So moving into this operation on that day, there's multiple units involved for this huge clearance operation, there's a big sweep and we were covering the back end."

To cover their part of the operation, the SEALs would occupy a local Iraqi home as a base to perform their overwatch mission. It was a common tactic during the war, and Iraqi homeowners were provided vouchers they could redeem with the Americans to cover any damages to their personal property as a result of the SEALs' operations. The kind of mission seen in "Warfare" is really standard operating procedure -- so standard, in fact, that even the enemy knows where they are and what they're doing.

"We assume that they [the insurgents] do know when we take a house," Mendoza said. "They eventually knew because of patterns of life: Maybe somebody in that house always goes over to drink tea with his friend every morning. And well, he usually shows up; why isn't he here? And so they're just like, 'Oh, maybe the Americans are in there.' They may see a periscope or a piece of netting or something to indicate that. We assume that at some point, they're going to know where we're at, and we observe them.

"In the movie, they're probing," he added. "People are looking at our position. You can see they know we're there because of how they're looking at us. Or you see somebody look around the corner and then they put their head back. You start to pick up these little indicators that they know that you're there."

The SEALs aren't just waiting to get hit. They're performing their overwatch and taking note of the enemy's "TTP" -- tactics, techniques and procedures. As they run their mission, they notice and report significant heavy weapons, along with individuals making moves of interest or writing it in an observation log. There are times, however, when the SEALs only know the enemy has certain weapons because they were used.

"It's like a game," Mendoza said. "They're evolving to our tactics; we evolved to theirs. They start putting IEDs in walls, because they know we line up on a wall. They start putting broken glass on top of walls, because we're jumping over, and so then we don't do that. So there's this game. It's not the family that's doing it; [it's] the insurgency that's doing it."

"Warfare" was conceived as an honest recreation of real events, and everything anyone really needs to know is on the screen, even when the shooting stops.

"Doing this film minute by minute for an hour-and-a-half, I think helps us tell a really honest story," Mendoza said. "When you get into gunfights, there's these battle rhythms that you start to recognize ... people get tired. You can't just run around, run and gun the whole time. People need rests. There's just these pauses. They need water. They need more ammo, so there's these lulls in the firefight. I think in doing it [in] real time, there's these battle rhythms of a firefight, a tempo, peaks and valleys; however you want to describe it, it allows us to really depict it accurately."

While this extra information is interesting in retrospect, and helps explain why Navy SEALs spent so much time occupying an Iraqi home, audiences don't need any of that information to stay engaged with "Warfare." The film is a memory recreated for (and dedicated to) one of the team members present that day, retired SEAL Elliott Miller.

"I don't think the context will change anything," Mendoza said. "What we did that day has happened so many days. It's just another day in Iraq. To be honest, it wasn't so much about the why. I did it for Elliott, because Elliott doesn't remember what happened that day."

Find out why Elliott doesn't remember that day when "Warfare" opens in theaters everywhere on April 11, 2025.

Related: 'Warfare': A Real-Time Iraq War Combat Film from a Navy SEAL and the Director of 'Civil War'

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