Planning

Major General Natonski assembled an operational planning team with representatives from throughout the Marine Air-Ground Task Force⁴ (MAGTF): 3rd Marine Air Wing (MAW), 1st Marine Logistics Group, the MEF and the Army. They all congregated to help the 1st Marine Division staff plan for the upcoming fight. “This was an all-star cast,” confirmed BGen Dunford.⁵ Months of groundwork conducted by General Mattis and his staff provided the foundation for Natonski’s plan.

Lieutenant Colonel Joe L’Etiole had served as Mattis’ deputy operations officer (G3) during the first fight for Fallujah in April of 2004. With his tour not yet complete, L’Etiole became Natonski’s Operations Officer. He brought the painful lessons learned that April to Natonski’s planning table.

In fact, all involved in the planning relied heavily on the lessons learned in previous fights. From the fight in Nasiriyah, Natonski brought memories of confused communications and a tragic friendly-fire incident. Dunford brought lessons learned during his march up to Baghdad and the first fight in Fallujah. Many in the staff carried with them lessons from the fight in Najaf during the sweltering summer of 2004. And, they had all learned much about the enemy in Fallujah during the preceding months.

In Vietnam, Major George (Ron) Christmas⁶ had been wounded in the fighting in Hue City and awarded the Navy Cross for his heroism while leading Hotel Company of Second Battalion, Fifth Marines in the largest urban fight of that war. He later became young Marine Lieutenant Natonski’s company commander at The Basic School.⁷ Major Christmas wrote several articles about the dangers of fighting house-to-house and building-to-building. He impressed upon his peers and students that urban fighting is a dirty business, requiring attention to detail and overwhelming firepower. Many on Natonski’s staff dug through the archives to retrieve Ron Christmas’ words of wisdom. They studied his lessons from the last time the Marines had conducted large-scale urban combat. They were determined to apply the lessons learned in Hue City to the fight before them.

The planning for Phantom Fury began with mission analysis. The mission was simple: destroy the enemy within Fallujah, so as to create conditions in which Fallujahans could regain control of their city. One of the biggest concerns was the “Information Operations (IO) Threshold”: what was the level of death and destruction the people of Iraq, America, and even the world was willing to see and still allow the battle to continue? The IO Threshold had been exceeded in the first fight, and General Metz did not want a recurrence of the spring failure. So restraint during the preparation and speed of execution were of the essence. The window of violent action had to be small and the enemy had to be defeated as quickly as possible. This is part of what drove the development of Natonski’s plan.

Natonski also understood Ron Christmas’ classic concerns regarding urban combat. He needed to isolate the insurgents inside Fallujah, including denying them re-supply and reinforcement. He needed to select an entry point. He needed to select the appropriate strategy: would the Marines swarm, surge, or fight house-to-house?

The combined staff members planned several different scenarios, and then war-gamed each course of action. Eventually they decided to attack from the north. They would need to pull two RCTs and a LAV-heavy⁸ task force into the Fallujah fight. But the operation could not be conducted in a vacuum. The city would have to be isolated, and the MSRs and FOBs would have to continue to be protected. Sattler, Natonski, and Dunford would have been hard-pressed to isolate and attack Fallujah with only the Marine forces on hand. Fortunately, all three officers were advocates of joint operations.

Once Dunford isolated the battlefield, the Marines would have to enter the city to destroy the enemy. First, however, they would have to hunt them down. In the wild, bears and lions drink with their heads down; they have no need to look around because they are the meanest predators around. But there were few bears or lions in Fallujah. This city was a den of jackals: Islamic extremists, disenfranchised former soldiers, Ba’ath Party leaders, foreign fighters, and young thugs—all there to kill Americans. Unlike bears or lions, the jackals were constantly looking over their shoulders and moving, wary of everything around them. Getting in position to kill them would not be easy. General Natonski needed a hunter to run his intelligence-gathering, someone to get inside these jackals’ heads, someone to prepare the battlefield. For that task he inherited Lieutenant Colonel George Bristol, a real-life hunter and martial arts expert, as his G2 Intelligence Officer.

Beyond leaders, planners, and a plan, however, Natonski needed fighters.