Ever since it was first announced as a publicity stunt during the State of the Union, the U.S.-built Gaza pier has been nothing but a money pit.

The project that was supposed to be an “emergency mission” to provide humanitarian aid into Gaza kept getting more expensive, as it became obvious that the Biden administration was writing checks with its mouth that the military couldn’t cash easily.

Officials with the US Central Command first brought up the option of building a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza in late October, the senior administration official told CNN. The risks however were deemed too great at the time, with unpredictable winter weather and heavy fighting in Gaza.

The pier also didn’t have a great track record operating in choppy seas.

It’s also been more than a decade since the military last used this kind of floating pier, known as a Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, in a real operation, when it delivered humanitarian aid to Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake.

“This is something that we haven’t done in a really long time,” a defense official told CNN.

“We assumed a lot of risk in using a military operation for this purpose,” a second senior administration official added. “We have done these kinds of operations before but not for this specific purpose, this capability is not typically used in these cases which creates a different dynamic”

There are also questions as to how well the Army maintains watercraft involved in JLOTS missions. Speaking to CNN on condition of anonymity, a retired warrant officer who served as a chief engineer on Army watercraft criticized the capability as a whole, saying that the Army has for years underestimated the difficulty around using the floating pier and does not invest enough resources to it.

“Army boats have not been ready, capable, or in a mindset they’ll have to do something dangerous or in the real world … for decades now,” the retired engineer said.

Didn’t matter. Joe Biden wanted the optics of a pier delivering food to people starving in Gaza, so a pier was going to be built – to the tune of $320 million. And then it broke. But hey! Now the Pentagon claims that even with $22 million in repairs after the pier was broken, the entire project is now only estimated to cost $230 million – so we’re really SAVING money! Government math at its finest, everyone.

Though DOD originally estimated U.S. Central Command’s Joint Logistics, Over-the-Shore capability to cost $320 million when the mission was first announced in early March, that figure is now reduced by approximately $90 million, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters.

Costs for contracted trucks, drivers and commercial vessels were lower than expected and the United Kingdom contributed a berthing vessel for soldiers and sailors. This lowered the latest cost assessment to approximately $230 million, Singh said.

She added that the $230 million figure includes costs associated with repairing and rebuilding the pier after high sea states and a rare North African weather system converged on May 25, causing the pier to become dislodged from the Gazan shoreline.

“As a reminder, these are estimates and initial assessments,” Singh said, “and the cost could fluctuate depending on the length of the mission and future cost — an example of that being additional repairs.”

Well, tack on some more money, because now the Gaza pier has had to be moved due to “rough seas” in order to prevent another breakup.

U.S. Central Command announced Friday that the U.S.-built pier was being removed from Gaza’s coast and towed back to Ashdod, Israel, to prevent it from being damaged. The pier will be “rapidly re-anchored” once water conditions are calm, CENTCOM said, but did not provide an estimate on when that would be.

“The decision to temporarily relocate the pier is not made lightly but is necessary to ensure the temporary pier can continue to deliver aid in the future,” the agency said in a statement.

The news that the Gaza pier was being moved again did not exactly inspire confidence.

Oh come on. Now this is just getting stupid.

Periodic reminder the Gaza Pier is a stunt designed to buy votes in Michigan and to undermine Israel by boosting the narrative of a humanitarian crisis. It's costing hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars and endangering… https://t.co/wA5U1TjvO4

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) June 14, 2024

The whole post reads:

Oh come on. Now this is just getting stupid.

Periodic reminder the Gaza Pier is a stunt designed to buy votes in Michigan and to undermine Israel by boosting the narrative of a humanitarian crisis. It’s costing hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars and endangering the lives of US servicemembers. There’s not even a coherent defense of it. On the merits the Pier is unnecessary for getting aid into Gaza, because more than enough comes in through land, and would be ineffective even if it was necessary, because it’s a dumb way to move aid. The whole thing is just brazenly an electoral and geopolitical performance act.

Breitbart News got a hold of a video from the pier itself moving in the “rough seas.”
https://twitter.com/kristina_wong/status/1801709744333128050
Now, there is an argument that the construction of the pier is fine, but this is not what it was ever intended to do – and that argument can certainly be made. The problem is, of course, that the Gaza pier was built on our dime, and every time it gets battered, broken, or moved, we pay the bills.

And what’s more, we might be paying the bills for a pier that might never be used again to move aid from anyone but the United States. After the successful rescue of four hostages last week, the United Nations has had its panties in a wad over the rumor that Israel may have used the Gaza pier to get into Gaza, and to evacuate the hostages after the rescue. Israel says that didn’t happen.

Rushing out a mortally wounded Israeli commando after the raid, Israeli rescuers opted against returning the way they came, across a land border, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, told reporters. Instead, they sped toward the beach and the site of the U.S. aid hub on Gaza’s coast, he said. An Israeli helicopter touched down near the U.S.-built pier and helped whisk away hostages and the commando, according to the U.S. and Israeli militaries.

For the U.N. and independent humanitarian groups, the event made real one of their main doubts about the U.S. sea route: whether aid workers could cooperate with the U.S. military-backed, Israeli military-secured project without violating core humanitarian principles of neutrality and independence and without risking aid workers becoming seen as U.S. and Israeli allies — and, in turn, targets in their own right.

Israel and the U.S. deny that any aspect of the month-old U.S. pier was used in the Israeli raid. They say an area near it was used to fly home the hostages.

The U.N. World Food Program, which works with the U.S. to transfer aid from the $230 million pier to warehouses and local aid teams for distribution within Gaza, suspended cooperation as it conducts a security review. Aid has been piling up on the beach since.

“You can be damn sure we are going to be very careful about what we assess and what we conclude,” U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said.

Griffiths told reporters at an aid conference in Jordan this week that determining that the Israeli raid improperly used either the beach or roads around the pier “would put at risk any future humanitarian engagement in that operation.”

The U.N. has to look at the facts as well as what the Palestinian public and militants believe about any U.S., pier or aid worker involvement in the raid, spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters in New York.

“Humanitarian aid must not be used and must not be perceived as taking any side in a conflict,” Haq said. “The safety of our humanitarian workers depends on all sides and the communities on the ground trusting their impartiality.”

Let me get out my tiny violin. Hostages were rescued from Gaza, the IDF never set foot on the stupid pier, and the UN is all butthurt because it might compromise their efforts to distribute aid straight to Hamas. And yes, that’s where the aid is going. Seeing as the UN’s own organization that is supposed to be “helping” the Palestinian people is basically a Hamas front, I think they should take ALL the seats on this one.

This Gaza pier was a incredibly poor idea to begin with, and the fault and failure stops at the top with Joe Biden. That it might now be perceived to be covered in IDF cooties, which makes it unusable for the UN because they want perception to be reality, is just the cherry on top of this $230 million boondoggle. If we were actually governed by real adults, then the United States would never have built this floating mess to begin with. But we are not. We have top men working on this. Top. Men.

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Featured image: Gaza Pier via X as released by CentComm, cropped and modified