Gaza aid dock challenges offer lessons for US military

Washington:It was his most challenging mission.

U.S. Army soldiers with the 7th Transportation Brigade had already set up a dock during training and exercises overseas, but they had never had to deal with the wild combination of turbulent weather, security threats and extensive personnel restrictions that surrounded the Gaza humanitarian aid project.

The so-called Joint Logistics Land System (JLOTS), designed as a temporary solution to get much-needed food and supplies to desperate Palestinians, faced a series of setbacks during the spring and summer. It managed to send more than 20 million tons of aid ashore for Gazans facing starvation during the war between Israel and Hamas.

Service members grappled with what Col. Sam Miller, who was a commander during 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 Army learned several lessons during the four-month mission. It began when President Donald Trump Joe BidenIn his State of the Union address in March, he announced that the pier would be built and would last until July 17, when the Pentagon formally declared the mission over and the pier would be permanently decommissioned.

The Army is reviewing the $230 million pier operation and what it learned from the experience. One conclusion, according to a senior Army official, is that the unit needs to train in tougher conditions to be better prepared for the bad weather and other safety issues it faces. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because evaluations of the pier project have not been made public.

In a report released this week, the inspector general for the U.S. Agency for International Development said Biden ordered the pier to be built even as USAID staff expressed concern that it would be difficult and undermine a push to persuade Israel to open “more efficient” land crossings to bring food into Gaza.

The Defense Department said the pier “achieved its objective of providing an additional means to deliver large volumes of humanitarian aid to the population of Gaza to help address the dire 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. shipping route and pier to provide food for 1.5 million people for 90 days. It fell short, bringing in enough to feed about 450,000 people for a month before shutting down, according to the USAID inspector general’s report.

The Defense Department’s watchdog is also conducting an evaluation of the project.

Army soldiers often have to conduct their exercises in harsh conditions designed to replicate war. After learning from the Gaza project — which was the first time the Army installed a dock in real combat conditions — leaders say they need to find ways to make the training even more challenging.

One of the biggest difficulties of the Gaza dock mission was that no American troops could disembark, a requirement imposed by Biden. Instead, American servicemen were spread out across a floating city of more than 20 boats and platforms miles from shore in need of food, water, beds, medical care and communications.

Each day, Miller said, there were as many as 1,000 trips that troops and other personnel made from ship to ship, from dock to port and back.

“We were constantly moving personnel out to sea and to Trident Pier,” Miller said. “And there were probably a thousand moves a day, which is a challenge, especially when you have to manage sea conditions.”

Military leaders, he said, had to plan three or four days in advance to ensure they had everything they needed because the journey from the dock to their “safe haven” in the Israeli port of Ashdod was about 30 nautical miles.

The round trip could take up to 12 hours, in part because the military had to sail about five miles out to sea between Ashdod and the pier to stay a safe distance from shore as it passed Gaza City, Miller said.

Typically, Miller said, when the Army establishes a pier, the unit establishes a shore command, making it much easier to store and access supplies and equipment or rally troops to give orders for the day.

While his command headquarters was on the U.S. Navy ship Roy P. Benavidez, Miller said he was constantly moving with key aides to different ships and to the pier.

“I slept and ate on every platform there was,” he said.

The U.S. Army official agreed that there were many unexpected logistical issues that a port operation normally does not involve.

Because ships were required to use the port of Ashdod and a number of civilian workers under the terms of the mission, contracts had to be negotiated and drawn up, agreements had to be made for ships to dock, and workers had to be hired for tasks that troops could not perform, including transporting aid to shore.

Communications was a struggle.

“Some of our systems on ships can be a bit slower in terms of bandwidth and it’s not possible to achieve the classified level,” Miller said.

He said he used a huge spreadsheet to keep track of all the boats and floating platforms, hundreds of people and the movement of millions of tons of aid from Cyprus to the Gaza coast.

When bad weather wrecked the dock, they had to find ways to get the pieces to Ashdod and repair them. Over time, he said, they were able to hire more tugboats to help move sections of the dock more quickly.

Some of the dock’s biggest problems — including aid agencies’ initial reluctance to distribute supplies throughout Gaza and subsequent security concerns over violence — may not apply in other operations where troops may be quickly setting up a dock for military forces to disembark for an assault or disaster response.

“All the soldiers, sailors and others gained a lot of educational value and experience,” Miller said. “There will be other places in the world where they may experience similar situations, but they will not be as difficult as what we just experienced.”

When the time comes, he said, “we will be much better at doing this kind of thing.”

A little information might have given the military a better idea about the strong waves that routinely battered the pier. It turns out, the army officer said, that there was a surf club in Gaza and its headquarters were near where they built the pier.

That “may be an indicator that the waves there were big,” the official said.

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