Firewall/NAT

I am using m0n0wall on a soekris net4501 sitting in between a cable modem and a load balancing firewall/router.
m0n0wall is basically only doing NAT and DHCP and the firewall rules I have set to Pass ANY/ANY/ANY on WAN and LAN,  as the next router down the line is doing the packet filtering
the m0n0wall net4501 is smallish hardware and I don't want to bottleneck the cable connection, which can burst at times over 20mbit/sec, and I'm not sure what the max throughput is.  regardless I want to keep the packet filtering rules centralized on the loadbalancer router, because this is just part of a bigger network

so rather than having filtering enabled, but having simply pass any rules, is it possible to just do NAT and disable the filtering completely?  Also despite having only 'pass any' rules setup, I still get packets being blocked that show up in the filter logs and I'm not sure why

You can't disable filtering without disabling NAT. They're done by the same component.

I still get packets being blocked that show up in the filter logs and I'm not sure why

http://doc.m0n0.ch/handbook/faq-legit-traffic-dropped.html