While it is easy to laugh and/or roll your eyes at yet another expensive, wasteful, ridiculous stunt-gone-bad by our hapless president, there is a real worry here.
TEL AVIV — The U.S. military has been forced to suspend aid deliveries into the Gaza Strip by sea after its temporary pier system off Gaza suffered damage in bad weather, the Defense Department confirmed Tuesday.
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The damage is the latest setback to the temporary pier system, which President Joe Biden announced during his State of the Union address in March and became operational just two weeks ago.
Over the weekend, four small U.S. military boats involved in ferrying aid broke from their moorings in bad weather, U.S. Central Command said. Two of them washed up on the coast of southern Israel near the city of Ashdod, while the other two beached in Gaza.
An American service member also remains in critical condition in an Israeli hospital after having suffered noncombat injuries on the pier last week, a U.S. defense official said. Two other service members sustained minor injuries.
The temporary pier, known in military parlance as a Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore capability, was designed to get more aid into Gaza and help fend off famine, which the U.N. says has broken out in the north of the besieged Strip.
While the policy to put this pier in was idiotic, we should expect our military to be able to execute it well. They did not. Our mighty American military appears incapable of an engineering feat that should be well within their abilities. We’ve been building temporary piers for the purpose of landing supplies in a war zone since the Civil War. Yet it’s sinking within a week? What if there were Americans under fire on the other end of that pier waiting for supplies?
The policy was bad, but the execution should have been flawless.
Yah, well, today’s military is simply low-caliber. Col. MacGregor bewails the situation all. the. time. SF operators are still premier-league, but that’s not an army.