CNN
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Hours after President Joe Biden touted the success of the temporary pier the military had just built in the Gaza Strip during his West Point graduation speech last Saturday, White House staff learned the pier was in danger of collapsing.
By Tuesday, rough seas and sudden storms off North Africa had run four Army ships aground, causing enough damage that the entire vessel had to be towed to Israel for repairs.
“We’re all disappointed,” a senior government official told CNN, adding that authorities had been preparing to increase the amount of aid delivered through the pier because it had been fully functional until it collapsed.
The jetty was the culmination of months of efforts by officials to find a way to get aid to Gaza without having to unload it from planes or send trucks through border crossings. Though it was only operational for just over a week, it helped deliver about 1,000 tons of aid to Gaza before it collapsed.
That’s far short of the military’s goal of transporting 500 tons of aid a day through the pier, and distribution of the aid that arrived in Gaza was initially held up by delays. The pier cost a massive $320 million to build and required 1,000 U.S. military personnel to complete before it was dismantled last week.
But with airdrops halted in recent weeks and the land route to Rafah now closed, the pier remains a potential lifeline for thousands of people in the Gaza Strip facing a humanitarian crisis.
Biden administration officials are optimistic that repairs and reconstruction will go smoothly in the coming weeks, but big questions remain about the pier’s reliability, which is why the administration decided months ago to hold off on deploying it.
CNN spoke with multiple US officials, who detailed the months of planning, preparation and troubleshooting that went into building the pier, as well as the ongoing efforts to repair it and keep it operational.
US Central Command officials first floated the idea of building a temporary pier off the Gaza coast in late October, a senior administration official told CNN, but at the time it was deemed too risky given unpredictable winter weather and ongoing fighting in Gaza.
The pier also had a poor track record of operating in choppy seas.
During a major military exercise in Australia last year, rough seas meant US soldiers had to wait for a “shortest window” to deploy piers, and similar issues arose during training exercises off the coast of Virginia in 2016.
The last time the military used these types of floating platforms — known as Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS — in an operational capacity was more than a decade ago, when they delivered humanitarian aid to Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010.
“This is something that hasn’t been done in a really long time,” a defense official told CNN.
“We believe that conducting a military operation for this purpose would entail significant risks,” the second administration official added. “We have conducted these types of operations before, but not for this specific purpose. This capability is not typically used in situations like this, and it creates a different dynamic.”
There are also questions about how well the Army maintains the surface craft it uses for JLOTS missions. A former warrant officer who served as the Army’s chief engineer for surface craft, speaking on condition of anonymity, told CNN that the Army has long underestimated the challenges of using the pontoons and has not devoted enough resources to them, criticizing the capability overall.
“For decades, military boats have not been ready, capable or prepared for dangerous situations and real-world action,” the retired engineer said.
Another U.S. official agreed that ships performing JLOTS missions are not maintained to the “required level,” primarily because of a “lack of funding to obtain repair parts in a timely manner.”
Parts for those repairs are also hard to come by and U.S. officials said they often aren’t readily available for purchase like those for Army vehicles.
“These ships are old,” the U.S. official said, adding that soldiers were carrying out repairs on at least one of the vessels just days before it was due to depart for Gaza.
A retired engineer was more critical, saying: “The rust on the ship has not been removed, parts have not been properly repaired and it is difficult to get replacement parts when needed because all the companies that supply them have gone out of business.”
When asked by CNN whether the Army was dedicating enough resources to surface boats, Secretary of the Army Christine Warmuth said she believed the Army was making the right investments in surface boats.
“The capabilities of JLOTS are great and I think it will be of great use there, but it’s not designed to operate in these high seas,” she said, adding that the sea conditions where JLOTS was anchored were unusual for this time of year but that they were expected to calm down “within a few days.”
Before construction on the pier began, the Pentagon had informed the White House that weather could be a hindrance. The Pentagon conducted studies going back 10 years to study weather patterns in that part of the Mediterranean, and ultimately determined it was safe enough. Last week’s storm was unexpected.
“This was a kind of extreme weather event,” a first administration official said. “We knew there were limitations in terms of weather, but studies showed the likelihood of experiencing something like that in the summer was low.”
Similar concerns were raised when the pier was first considered last fall.
An administration official told CNN that talks about the maritime corridor began around the end of October. When Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides raised the idea at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting, officials were given a “big picture” but few details were included about who would provide the funding and construction. The U.S. was not at the meeting, but the White House heard about the idea through other partners who were in attendance, including France and Britain, the official said.
As the White House began considering its options, officials looked into the feasibility of a temporary pier, but ultimately determined that the IDF’s operations and weather conditions at the time made the existing pier too risky.
But as the need for humanitarian aid became more urgent in January and February, the calculations changed. U.S. officials began communicating with Cypriot and Israeli officials and discussing logistics, including providing armed protection from the IDF and using Cyprus as a base for delivering aid.
Around that time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised the idea again in meetings with U.S. officials and then told the Pentagon to reconsider it, according to people familiar with the matter. A major concern was competition for the Pentagon’s resources: In addition to costing hundreds of millions of dollars, officials knew the project would require thousands of American personnel to pull off.
As authorities investigated the pier, the U.S. military began airdropping humanitarian supplies, dropping more than 1,200 tons of food and aid, but it also proved dangerous.
At least five people were killed when an airdropped package fell on them in early March, and a few weeks later 12 Palestinians drowned while swimming to reach it in the sea off Gaza’s northern coast.
That month, the White House gave the go-ahead for the pier’s construction, and President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union address that he was ordering the military to lead an emergency mission to build a temporary pier on Gaza’s coast.
Despite the challenges, officials remain convinced the pier remains a valuable means of continuing to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip, where residents are suffering from “full-blown hunger.”
State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said Thursday that it was “an important part of our overall humanitarian effort.” Defense Department deputy spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Tuesday that it was vital for the people of Gaza “to get all the help we can, by whatever means necessary.”
As of Thursday, all parts of the pier had been towed to Ashdod, Israel, where defense officials said welding would take place and the pins holding the pier in place would likely be replaced.
But repairing the pier through welding is also weather dependent and will be increasingly difficult to complete if the seas are not stable.
“Imagine welding in ‘Mad Max.’ You’re basically standing on the back of a big tractor-trailer driving down the highway and trying to weld something precisely. Unless you have perfect conditions, it’s not rational,” the engineer said.
It’s unclear how the military will respond to potentially rough seas later this year. Another defense official said there are discussions about removing the pier if bad weather approaches, but that may require it to be removed from the shore and then anchored again.
“The most important thing now is that whatever happened, we don’t let it happen again,” the defense official said.
But the officials stressed that the administration continues to maintain that ultimately the best way to get aid to Gaza is for Israel to open more land border crossings.
Pentagon deputy spokeswoman Sabrina Singh stressed that aid to Gaza remains via land border crossings. Airdrops and jetties are just additional ways to deliver aid, she said.
“This is not a solution,” she said of the jetty, “so I want to remind everyone that the best way to bring food, medicine, fuel and other essentials to Gaza is by land.”
