When President Joe Biden announced that the United States military would be building a pier off the shore of Gaza to inject much needed aid to the Palestinians there, he attempted to marshal the old feelings undergirding the "indispensable nation" — we would use our might, know-how, and ability to crack into action to make things right.
Turns out that our might and know-how was desperately lacking and, as time would tell (and skeptics at the time would have told you), making things "right" would have been using the leverage Washington had to tell the Israelis to open up the aid flood gates, not try to build a land bridge to get it in through the back door.
A new Pentagon Inspector General report finds that the pier operation, which took place for several months in the spring of 2024, was a bigger failure than earlier reported. It was also a gigantic hazard. According to the Washington Post, which reported about this today, some 62 military personnel were injured (exact causes still unknown), and one Army soldier, Sgt. Quandarias Stanley, was killed in a forklift accident, dying from his injuries five months later.
The operation cost U.S. taxpayers $320 million (yes, a fraction of the money spent on U.S. weapons to Israel during this time), but barely any assistance if any actually got to the Gazans at the heart of the mission. Meanwhile, according to the IG, more than two dozen U.S. watercraft and other equipment were damaged in a three month time period, causing $31 million in repairs.
The operation, which engaged the Army's Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, as written about in these pages, was supposed to deploy both a floating pier to receive international aid from Cyprus and an extended one connected to the shore. Once built, the one on the shore was shut down at least twice because of the waves and weather conditions. Workers on the shore came under mortar fire, presumably by militants. The food actually got to the beach but it rotted away in warehouses because the Israelis did not offer a workable pathway to get it through the security checkpoints to Gazans inside.
The IG report takes aim at the military for missing the mark, according to the Post:
The Army and Navy did not meet standards for equipment and unit readiness, the report said, “nor did they organize, train, and equip their forces to meet common joint standards.” Transportation Command, which oversees coordination of military assets, also fell short of standards in planning and exercises, the report found....
Crucially, Army and Navy equipment — including watercraft, piers, causeways and communication systems — were not designed to work together, which led to damage in the Gaza operation. Planners also did not think through mission-specific needs, such as beach conditions and sea states, that should have informed how commanders executed the operation.
The mission seemed ill-fated from the beginning as it was born out of the desperation of an administration that, falling short of using the power of the White House to force the Israelis to stop its collective punishment or face a cutoff of Washington's generous support, decided to stage a spectacle to divert the world's attention from its failures. We know now that Biden pushed the military to move forward despite warnings that logistically, it wouldn't work.
It only made things worse, reflecting the impotence of the world's "superpower" and the emptiness of Biden's words and commitment to leadership. A year later, Gaza is facing outright destruction and its people are literally starving to death. The Gaza pier is but an IG report now, a footnote to American folly in this intractable conflict.
Top photo credit: Ngô Đình Diệm after being shot and killed in the 1963 coup (US National Archives) 
