Back in March, four US Army vessels sailed from Virginia “to establish a roll-on, roll-off dock capability that allows ship-to-shore humanitarian assistance to Gaza.”
The idea was to use elements of the US military’s Joint Logistics Over The Shore (JLOTS) system to deliver aid – mostly food – straight into Gaza, so avoiding delays and problems at the various land border crossings.
At the time I wrote: “is this a practical solution to a dire situation or the US trying (too hard) to show leadership in the absence of any meaningful progress ashore?”
Last week, US Central Command announced that the JLOTS deployment had “closed out its mission” after delivering more than 9,000 tonnes of aid. The American servicemen and equipment involved have now been withdrawn, even though more than 2,000 tonnes of aid which had been planned to be delivered via JLOTS has not been. That aid will now go via alternative routes involving land border crossings.
So how successful was the JLOTS effort? What lessons can we learn from it?
I’m a 27-year Navy man and I know a lot about beaches, waves, wind and harbours – and a bit about logistics and amphibious operations. So I’m going to concentrate as much as I can on these areas, and steer clear of politics as much as I can – though this issue can’t be discussed without mentioning the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Hamas and events in Gaza.
First, let’s set the scene. The Gaza Strip has no significant harbours along its coast. Food supplies for its two-million-plus residents have long been insecure, and Gaza has long been reliant on trucks bringing in aid through its various land crossings.
If the land crossings were unrestricted, there would be easily enough logistic capacity that everyone in Gaza could have enough to eat, and it would not be difficult to ensure adequate water supplies too. The crossings have never been unrestricted since Israel gave up control of Gaza, however, and especially not since Hamas took it over. Hamas openly boasts that it uses aid supplies such as water pipes and concrete to make rockets and underground tunnels, and this sort of issue leads the Israelis to inspect and interfere with aid shipments as routine. In the absence of an actual shooting war, however, the situation has generally been tolerable.
Since the Hamas atrocities in Israel on October 7, there has been a major shooting war and the humanitarian situation in the Strip has deteriorated badly – sufficiently badly that by March, US President Joe Biden was under a lot of pressure to be seen to be doing something. Most of the people pressuring him considered that the primary problem preventing aid getting to hungry people in Gaza was IDF restrictions on the border crossings, so whatever solution he advanced needed to at least look as though it would deal with this. It also needed to avoid – quite literally, in President Biden’s view – any US serviceman or woman setting so much as a foot ashore in Gaza.
The no-boots requirement was the problem, not Gaza’s lack of any proper harbours. Conventional US amphibious forces – and they are still enormous – are entirely dedicated to doing without harbours. The US Marines and their amazing panoply of hovercraft, landing craft, swimming vehicles, tiltrotors, helicopters and many other things can easily shift huge amounts of stuff ashore across a beach.
But the US Marines are also entirely dedicated to putting their boots on the shore, and this is exactly what President Biden did not want.
Separate from the Marines and their supporting Navy assault ships, however, the US also has JLOTS – in this case a selection of things and capabilities distributed between the US Army’s surprisingly numerous feet-wet people and various feet-dryish, not very well known bits of the Navy.
The rough idea of JLOTS is that fine, someone – maybe the Marines – has secured a bridgehead somewhere, but no local harbour can be captured. Or maybe we do have a harbour, but it is smashed up and can’t be used. Meanwhile there’s a need to get stuff ashore in proper large quantities – more than can be delivered by the Marines.
Consequently, JLOTS has various cunning pieces of equipment. One of the best is its offshore-onshore pipeline system, in which a tanker ship can moor up to a buoy planted off the coast and plug into a hose, and huge amounts of fuel or water can then be piped over the beach to a distribution terminal ashore. The pipeline is largely impervious to wind, wave and weather. This wasn’t used in Gaza, however, as the primary need was perceived as being food.
Another great bit of JLOTS kit is the Elevated Causeway – Modular, or ELCAS-M. This is a system in which modules of steel deck are floated out from the beach. Heavy vertical steel piles are driven down into the seabed and the deck modules are lifted up out of the sea supported on the piles to form a strong pier. Calm conditions are needed to build the ELCAS-M, but once it’s built it can resist bad weather and big waves. In reasonable weather, small ships and lighters can come alongside it to deliver shipping containers, which can then be shifted ashore over the surf zone at quite a high rate. ELCAS-M even has a nifty turntable at the seaward end, which means the container lorries don’t need to reverse back onto the shore.
ELCAS-M could not be used in Gaza, however, as it is built out from the beach. All the modules, all the piles and a lot of specialist equipment and people need to be put on the beach before this can start, and that would have been a lot of US boots ashore.
That left the JLOTS planners with their other pier, the so-called “Trident” pier, which floats rather than resting on pilings. The Trident pier is made up from interlocking floating modules. Normally the pier is put together offshore in calm conditions by dragging the floating modules together and assembling them in the form of a trident. The three points are docks for “ro-ro” (roll-on, roll-off) ships, which will offload trucks full of stuff that then drive down the shaft to the beach. Trident has to use ro-ro as it can’t support big container cranes as ELCAS-M can.
While the Trident is being assembled in the sea, a bulldozer on the shore digs a “duck pond” at the water’s edge. Boats then take charge of the assembled Trident and “stab the beach”, driving the base of the Trident’s staff into the duck pond. The floating outer parts of the Trident are then secured with anchors and ro-ro ships can come in to unload trucks.
For the Gaza operation, the US JLOTS team dispensed with the traditional trident configuration, simply assembling a rectangular unloading area at the pier’s seaward end. As much of the aid was set to arrive aboard non ro-ro ships without trucks, they also assembled and moored a separate floating platform further offshore, where normal cargo vessels could unload aid for transfer onto smaller JLOTS ro-ro vessels and trucks, which could then unload at the pier.
As they were not allowed to set foot ashore, the JLOTS soldiers and sailors couldn’t do the “duck pond” and had to train IDF troops to do that part of the operation. The IDF also provided security at the land end of the pier. One great success of the scheme was that the IDF were persuaded not to check the cargoes at this point, but on the ships far away before they arrived. They were willing to trust the US not to switch cargoes on them and/or include items they were unwilling to let Hamas have. This cooperation by the IDF was the big success point for the operation.
But there were still problems. The first was that the Trident pier simply wasn’t robust enough to withstand the seasonal conditions and kept breaking apart, with pieces of it and accompanying Army vessels frequently winding up stranded on the beach. It repeatedly had to be towed away from Gaza to the nearby Israeli harbour of Ashdod for repairs and reassembly. Several US personnel were injured, one very badly.
The pier was available to use for just 25 days between its first beach-stab on May 16 and its final withdrawal on June 28. That’s a bit less than two-thirds of the time: and given the amount of damage the pier repeatedly suffered, it represents a fairly heroic job by the soldiers and sailors of JLOTS.
The fact is that the sea-shore interface (or the beach as it’s often known – that’s if you’re lucky and it isn’t cliffs or rocks) could be the hardest maritime operating environment there is. It has all the disadvantages of being out at sea with a couple of difficult new ones thrown in. Apart from people, everything moves around the world by sea: but we forget how difficult sea-shore is because of how easy the modern system of mega container ports makes this interface look. But take all that infrastructure away – and also take away the protection from the weather that comes with a natural or artificial harbour – and getting things from sea to shore requires massive investment and technical expertise. There are no quick fixes.
The ability to do this away from existing ports is a capability that has been steadily eroded in the US military and almost vanished elsewhere. It’s why I’m uncomfortable with the (effective) mothballing of the Royal Navy’s two landing ships “because we’ll never storm the beach again”. That may be true but the requirement to move people and things from sea to shore in suboptimal conditions (forget being under fire) will never go away and as the Gaza pier has shown, it is not something you can half do.
The other major point on the failure of the Gaza pier isn’t a maritime one but can’t be ignored – it’s the issue of how to manage the aid once delivered.
The problem of IDF delays and restrictions had, as we’ve seen, been fixed in the case of the JLOTS operation. The plan was that once the food was ashore, aid agencies would take charge of delivering it to hungry Gazans. As it worked out, however, aid workers were collecting food from the pier for only about half the time it was available, causing supplies to pile up on the beach.
The problem the aid workers had was the deep distrust by Hamas of anything to do with the IDF and the US. Given the number of aid drivers who had already been killed by Hamas attacks, IDF attacks, looters mobbing convoys for food and so on, they were understandably skittish right from the start.
Then came the Israeli operation to rescue four of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas last year. This involved a major incursion into Nuseirat, close by the pier, on June 8. The Israelis landed a helicopter on an open area near the pier to fly out the hostages. Hamas were extremely angry and humiliated.
A US spokesman said, “the pier, the equipment, the personnel all supporting that humanitarian effort had nothing to do with the [Israeli military] rescue operation” but it was too late. Nobody was listening, and all across social media wild statements were being made to the effect that the aid effort was a lie and the pier was an Israeli (or joint US-Israeli) base for the IDF war in Gaza, the rescue had been launched from it etc etc. The UN World Food Programme, which cannot operate in Gaza without Hamas guarantees of safety for its personnel, ceased operations at the pier – though it has since said that it has hired contractors to move the food to warehouses so that it won’t spoil.
The food is in Gaza one way or another – though it isn’t only the Israelis who are sceptical about who gets most of it.
“All the aid goes underground,” an elderly Palestinian woman told al-Jazeera back in December. “Hamas takes everything.”
In the end the problem was not the tough beach environment, it was politics. JLOTS could have beaten the weather if it could have put people on the beach to install ELCAS-M. Separately the US operation did solve the IDF interference problem: but America could solve that at any entry point, it doesn’t need a pier. The IDF would trust US military trucks and drivers running from their own inspection points to Gaza crossings with or without ships involved.
What the US probably can’t solve is the environment within Gaza and the problem of handing over aid into it. Wherever and however it happens, the transition of aid from places under IDF control to places under Hamas control is a very difficult problem and it is all but impossible to ensure that aid reaches those who need it from there. Simply pushing more aid in can certainly help, however – most analysts say the situation has improved since March.
But as Sonali Korde of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) says: “The key challenge we have right now in Gaza is around the insecurity and lawlessness that is hampering the distribution once aid gets into Gaza”.
Gesture politics and contested maritime operations do not make good bedfellows. Having ordered a solution that could have worked if properly resourced but didn’t because it wasn’t, President Biden should use his remaining time in office to ensure that land routes involving close US cooperation with the IDF become the standard solution – and indeed USAID has affirmed that this is the plan.
Regardless of the way things worked out, the American people at least should be proud of the soldiers and sailors of the US Army’s 7th Transportation Brigade (Expeditionary) and the US Navy’s Amphibious Construction Battalion 1 – a unit of the famous “Seabees”. They worked night and day to make this half-solution into a full one in often horrendous and dangerous conditions. With inadequate equipment and their hands tied behind their backs, they nonetheless delivered a large amount of food to the shore in an operation which no other nation could even have attempted.
Whoever messed up here, it wasn’t them.
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