WASHINGTON — It was their most challenging mission.
American soldiers from the 7th Transportation Brigade had previously set up a pier during training and exercises abroad, but had never encountered the wild combination of stormy weathersecurity threats and significant staffing restrictions that the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Project.
Designed as a temporary solution to much needed food and the delivery of supplies to desperate Palestinians, the so-called Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, faced a series of setbacks in the spring and summer. It has managed to send more than 20 million tons of aid to Gazans facing famine during the war between Israel and Hamas.
Soldiers struggled with what Col. Sam Miller, who commanded the project, called the greatest “organizational leadership challenge” he had ever experienced.
Speaking to The Associated Press after much of the unit returned home, Miller said the military learned a number of lessons during the four-month mission. It began when President Joe Biden announced the pier would be built in his State of the Union address in March and lasted until July 17, when the Pentagon formally declared the mission over and the pier was permanently dismantled.
The Army is reviewing the $230 million pier operation and what it has learned from the experience. One of the key takeaways, according to a senior Army official, is that the unit needs to train under more demanding conditions to be better prepared for bad weather and other security issues it facedThe official spoke on condition of anonymity because assessments of the pier project have not yet been made public.
In a report published this weekThe U.S. Agency for International Development’s inspector general said Biden ordered construction of the pier even as USAID officials expressed concerns that it would be difficult and an effort to convince Israel to open “more efficient” land crossings to get food into Gaza.
The Defense Department said the pier “has accomplished its purpose of providing an additional means to delivering large amounts of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza to help address the acute humanitarian crisis.” The U.S. military knew from the beginning “that there would be challenges as part of this complex emergency,” the statement added.
The Biden administration had set a goal for the U.S. sea lane and pier to provide food to feed 1.5 million people for 90 days. It was not enough to feed about 450,000 people for a month before it was closed, according to the USAID inspector general’s report.
The Ministry of Defence supervisor is also conducting an evaluation of the project.
Army soldiers often have to perform their exercises under harsh conditions that simulate war. Learning from the Gaza Project — which marked the first time the Army has deployed a pier in real combat conditions — leaders say they must find ways to make the training even more challenging.
One of the biggest challenges of the Gaza pier mission was that no U.S. troops could land — a Biden requirement. Instead, U.S. troops were scattered across a floating city of more than 20 ships and platforms miles offshore in need of food, water, beds, medical care and communications.
According to Miller, as many as a thousand trips were made every day by troops and other personnel, from ship to boat, to the pier, to the harbor and back.
“We were constantly moving personnel across the sea and into Trident Pier,” Miller said. “And there were probably about a thousand moves every day, which is quite challenging, especially when you have sea conditions that you have to manage.”
Military leaders, he said, had to plan three or four days ahead to ensure they had everything they needed, as the journey from the pier to their “safe haven” in the Israeli port of Ashdod was about 30 nautical miles.
The trip there and back could take up to 12 hours, in part because the army had to sail about five miles (8 kilometers) out to sea between Ashdod and the pier to keep a safe distance from the coast as they passed Gaza City, Miller said.
Normally, Miller said, when the military builds a pier, it sets up a command post on land, making it much easier to store and access supplies and equipment, or to assemble troops to issue orders for the day.
While his command center was on the U.S. military ship Roy P. Benavidez, Miller said he was constantly traveling to the various ships and the pier with his top aides.
“I slept and ate on every platform there,” he said.
The U.S. military official admitted that there were many unexpected logistical problems that would not normally arise in a pier operation.
Because the ships had to use the port of Ashdod and some civilian labor under the terms of the mission, contracts had to be negotiated and written. Agreements had to be worked out so that ships could dock, and laborers had to be hired for tasks that troops could not do, including moving relief supplies to shore.
Communication was difficult.
“Some of our systems on the vessel can be a little slower in terms of bandwidth, and you can’t get down to the classified level,” Miller said.
He said he used a huge spreadsheet to keep track of all the ships and floating platforms, hundreds of personnel and the movement of millions of tons of aid from Cyprus to the Gaza coast.
When bad weather destroyed the pier, they had to figure out ways to move the pieces to Ashdod and repair them. Over time, he said, they were able to hire more tugboats to move parts of the pier more quickly.
Some of the major problems with the pier, including initial reluctance by aid agencies to distribute supplies throughout Gaza and later security concerns over the violence, may not apply to other operations, where troops can quickly set up a pier to get military forces ashore for an attack or disaster response.
“There’s a lot of training value and experience that every soldier, sailor and everyone else got out of this,” Miller said. “There’s going to be other places in the world that might have similar things, but they’re not going to be as tough as the things we just went through.”
When the time comes, he said, “we’ll get much better at this kind of thing.”
One piece of information could have given the military better warning of the heavy seas that would routinely hit the pier. It turned out, the military official said, that there was a Gaza surfing club and that its headquarters were near where they had built the pier.
That “could be an indication that the waves were big there,” the official said.
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AP reporters Tara Copp and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed.