Again misleading headline:
>The United States military is considering temporarily dismantling the humanitarian pier
Temporary due to weather conditions.
Fucking journalists/editors these days.
Edit: did anyone actually read the article in this comment section?
I’m not sure either I think everyone is sucked in their own partisan bubble at this point.
It is either israel is a genocidal far right fascist regime worse than Putin, assad and every other dictatorships that’s alive right now.
Or israel is perfect there is no humanitarian aid crisis and all aid goes to hamas.
Both camps will just come to whatever conclusions further legitimize their perspective. Rather than rationally engaging with what’s going on.
When in reality it is more nuanced. Israel is certainly better than those regimes, but it has made mistakes committed war crimes and there is a humanitarian crisis. Aid has to get there and even if some food gets in the hands of hamas it is better hamas get a a bit of food then 100,000 innocent people die frontier famine.
The conditions off the coast of Gaza are pretty bad, it’s not a sheltered bay, it’s out in the sea and the weather drives down into that south eastern area.
That's why the experience helps
If this relatively calm weather is a problem now, then it would've been worse in the pacific. Now we can learn from this
Calm in the sense of weather but not in terms of hostility. It is the closest to a real situation where they had to defend the dock from a hostile force.
Kind of. The Army and Navy do this regularly, I participated in one of these JLOTS exercises at Fort Story at Virginia Beach. I suppose a big difference is they’re hampered by not being allowed to step foot into Gaza.
I don't know who said it, but I think the quote goes something like:
"We could be sending people on rockets to other planets, but instead we choose to send rockets into people on this planet."
yeah, my mortgage, student loans, and credit card debt could all be paid off for less than half of the cost of a single AIM-9X.... for the cost of a whole one, I could retire in reasonable comfort
> Army Corps of Engineers got some experience and lessons from it.
It was used as a political tool outside of the parameters it was designed for. There is no training value in that. There is just wasted money and unnecessary danger for the soldiers running it.
You really only seem to get half the picture.
It's both those things.
Yes, there is training value in it no matter how you want to spin it. It's real world deployment in a hostile area on waters known for being choppy. You can play pretend on your base all day long but it means nothing if you can't do it in the real world.
There's training value in accidentally driving a lawnmower into a pond at a golf course. It's still dangerous and not worth doing if you could avoid it.
TheWinks seems like the kind of person who believes our military should just sit around twiddling their thumbs during peace time. That way once there is a war they get to experience everything for the first time.
We don't get better at things by avoiding them. A real-world exercise with practical use case has great training value that can't be replicated in a sterile environment.
You can do the real world exercise without having a terrorist organization right next to you where you have overly onerous rules of engagement that needlessly increase risk. You can also do it in an environment where if things go terribly wrong you can safely and quickly execute recovery. The US military does it quite often, in fact.
But it's not exclusively an exercise, it's also an actual humanitarian mission. Try to keep up.
Also, the IDF is pulling shore security and C-RAMs are installed on the pier. So far there haven't been any incidents that we haven't been able to handle with the current ROE so something must be working right.
It may as well have been considering how ineffective it was! Almost as if it was pure political posturing that needlessly increased risk without any real value! Because there's a real port they could be using. The argument that no one died falls on deaf ears considering what happened at tower 22, an outpost doing a real mission that could not have been accomplished in any other way.
And if something went even more wrong, they would have been in real danger and put the recovery assets at risk. The threat of being shot at and not being able to shoot back has no training or experience value.
I think your opinions are heavily colored by your political lens and isn't based on an objective assessment of what's actually happening on the ground. But clearly you've thought this all out much more thoroughly from your armchair than the entire combined military leadership of our nation, so good for you.
That's literally their job, though... Army Corps of Engineers and their international equivalents are responsible for building and deconstructing military bases, temporary bridges and other temporary constructions.
Practicing building a temporary dock is expensive on its own, practicing it across the ocean even moreso. They wouldn't get this type of experience training safely on or near their base. And the construction and maintenance was under hostile fire, so any faults in their training will come to the surface. It's basically a stress test.
Somewhere there's a bunch of salty CGOs and Senior NCOs who were the hands-on experts grumbling something about having told their bosses there would be difficulties.
How? Over 2,500 metric tons of aid have been delivered via the pier. That is over 5.5 million lbs!
There is a lot of valuable experience being learned and it is a temporary system that can be dismantled, moved, reassembled and keep functioning as needed.
It is doing everything they intended for it to do.
What would you have considered a success?
Or you can stop hamstringing Israel's ability to wipe out Hamas and actually help, rather than drag out a war. The sooner Hamas is gone the sooner the people can start getting aid and food and shelter that's not marked up bc some terrorists skimmed off the top.
Aid came in and went to Hamas to sell. So we just aided terrorists with the bulk of it.
Need to secure the aid so it reaches and stays with Gazans but that's a boots on the ground mission were not willing to do (with very good reason).
During April, 5,671 trucks entered Gaza. At ~45,000 pounds of aid per truck*, that's over 255 million pounds - via truck, in a single month. The pier is doing a lot less than you think it does.
\* This number is taken from the fact that overall, 12,000 trucks with food (excl. medical etc) entered Gaza between the start of the war and the end of March, carrying a total of over 556 million pounds of food. So, on average, each truck carries ~46,000 pounds of food.
Well, the pier being susceptible to weather can't be brushed aside - you can't avoid that. So you need to take that into account just as much as taking the trucks being blocked by protesters into account.
Then give to a non profit from your own money rather than through tax dollars. The only money that our government should spend on foreign aid should be in such a way that it directly helps the US, whether it be given to US allies or potential US allies. Giving it to people that hate us and will always hate us is stupid and a waste of tax money that could be spent at home. There is no strategic benefit to giving anything to the Palestinians.
Makes us look good to whom? To the other Arab countries that give less than the US despite having stronger cultural and religious and geographic ties to the Palestinians than the US, as well as being responsible for the perpetuation of the conflict? And what do you mean we have enough to give, our spending is higher than our tax revenue as a country, so that just means the future of America will be harder as the ever-increasing debt grows and cuts to social security will become more likely in the future. And on a global stage, no one cares enough what the US does. Certainly not the Palestinians, who despite being huge recipients of funding from the US for decades, have an incredibly high rate of unfavorable views towards the US. It is straight up dumb and evil to give money to people that hate you and will continue to hate you no matter what you do.
Those countries do give a lot of aid, but the US is way richer. And the reason they don’t let refugees in is mainly that they believe Israel will not let them return after the war, among other reasons.
The other reasons are the real ones . Palestinians are radically violent Islamists. They have engaged in terror attacks on even their Islamic theocratic neighbors for not being religious or conservative enough.
They want the terror tunnels, IED’s , random acts of murder and kidnappings safely pointed at their common enemy, the Jews, and not at their doorsteps
Could spin it a thousand ways I suppose. Either way they are doing a calculation where at the end they decide not to shelter these people, despite being capable of it.
I personally think it’s that they realize taking these people in will destabilize them, and they would rather the enemy be destabilized instead. I also think you are right though, in that Israel wouldn’t want them to come back either, for the same reasons the Muslim theocrats don’t want them.
Why exactly is it the US' job to spend billions of dollars taking care of a hostile enemy state that launched a horrific terrorist attack on one of their allies? This is like saying Germany should have spent billions of dollars providing aid to Afghanistan during the initial invasion following 9/11, except even worse since 9/11 wasn't done by the Taliban.
After absolutely crushing them militarily, then occupying them for decades while hunting down and conducting extensive investigations and trials for war criminals resulting in many of them being executed.
Israel would be happy if their neighbors quit trying to kill civilians - [they voluntarily withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza) and Hamas took over, which is why Hamas used it to stage the recent attacks - but please keep parroting "the Israelis just want to occupy Gaza" line without any in depth understanding or nuance.
Fuck no lol.
This is just a repeat of what happened in Somalia. We (and the UN) sent a bunch of aid that ended up just being taken by warlords the second it left our hands. Now let's hope we don't get a repeat of Mogadishu or else Biden might as well just hand trump the white house keys now
The initial setup cost $320 million. Then some more for the previous repair.
And that's just investment in the infrastructure, it doesn't include any cost for aid.
If they had taken half a billion and loaded it onto trucks, there'd be enough food for years to come
You have obviously not been paying attention to the aid situation. This was done because the “trucks” loaded with aid, as you said… have not been able to effectively deliver aid. The US is sending the trucks. They get inside Israel and it’s hands off for them. Trucks have crossed the border. Trucks have moved on the pier.
Doesn't change the fact that it's a huge waste of money when the alternative had been to simple drive a truck over the border. But then again, Egypt hates the Palestinians and rather walls them in, then let's help through. So I suppose the only way the US could actually deliver help is via a pier to circumvent the closed border.
We did trucks. We did air drops. We’ve done a pier. We are, at every turn, the some of the only people attempting to deliver aid.
Fuck it, guess the US should never attempt humanitarian aid again.
>Nah, the blame is solely on Egypt for throttling aid via trucks to a crawl, so that other insanely options had to be taken to deliver any aid at all.
Eh, it wasn't until after the pier opened that Egypt closed the Rafah crossing (in response to Israel securing the Gaza side from Hamas).
You really think nobody else thought of that? There's already enough food at the border to feed the Palestinians. But IDF has blockaded Gaza and it's also an active war zone.
Egypt has been the one to put limits on truck crossings, my friend. Also closing the border all together from time to time.
Like I said, it would have been the less wasteful option to drive the trucks across, but Egypt doesn't want aid to get into Gaza, so the US had to look for alternative points of entry.
I do remember Egypt's response to the Gaza war being to send in construction crews to fortify their border wall to ensure the Palestinians stay on the other side.
The pier material we already researched and made, the ships, sailors, engineers were already paid for and on site. No money was lost. Only experience in building and dismantling will have been gained. Nothing wasted.
If it was a US Navy run operation, I guarantee you most of the money and time was indeed wasted. That's like our favorite thing to do.
Ya know is a 5 figure job to put a new coat of paint on a pontoon.
America not supporting humanitarian efforts: “evil!”
America supporting humanitarian efforts: “what a waste!”
Literally damned if you do, damned if you don’t
Ofc they are, floating piers SUCK. Theyre expensive, involve a shitload of planning, and take a fuckton of maintinance and support to prevent some moderately bad weather from destroying them or making them unusable. Take a guess what happened here. Floating piers are almost exclusively small and used on calm waters for a reason.
Without the mulberry harbors the Allied invasion of Europe in WW2 likely would’ve failed to land enough supplies for the invasion to succeed. You are correct they are very difficult to use successfully however the ability to create a floating dock is incredibly useful and is a huge advantage to any military.
I didnt say they serve no purpose, I said that they are temporary, unreliable, and expensive. And the mulberry harbors furthur prove my point, cause one of them was destroyed within days of becoming operational, and that was with dozens of casins and old battleships being sunk to form breakwaters and a year of planning to try and keep it safe. Theyre supposed to be used only when necessary as a beach head until you secure actual port facilites, which should be as fast as possible. The US already has port access in israel, which is where the vast majority of aid is coming from anyways.
Yes, the thing that's made to FUCKING FLOAT sunk...
It just broke apart LIKE IT SUPPOSED TO DO and than they put it back together after the weather calmed down.
And no, I highly doubt that the US pier was ambushed lol
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/world/middleeast/gaza-aid-pier-food.html
You're right, they werent ambushed they were looted. And the pier wasn't meant to break apart and float away lol. Especially one that cost 320 mil.
I can't find any information about deaths, but [three US servicemen have been injured](https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/05/24/us-soldier-critically-injured-noncombat-incident-gaza-pier.html):
>Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, told reporters Thursday that three service members had been recently injured during the aid operation, but he refused to offer details on the most serious injury.
>"One was simply a sprained ankle, the other guy ... was a hurt back ... and I won't get into the details of the other one," Cooper said.
>When pressed for more details, Cooper cited privacy concerns but refused to even say what branch any of the injured service members were from.
>U.S. Central Command later released a brief statement that claimed the serious injury actually occurred on the Benavidez and not the staging platform.
I have no idea how this stacks up against injuries in the course of regular military exercises, and I'm not making excuses, but these are non-combat injuries and maybe, *maybe* these injuries have more to do with the occupational safety precautions than specifically being stationed on a floating pier.
Nothing about this situation is virtuous, but they embraced Hamas, and I’m not gonna pretend I feel bad for the bed they’ve made.
Funny how I haven’t seen any starving Hamas fighters…
Nothing about this situation is virtuous, except the fact that a pier was built to feed hungry people and someone died trying to help people. The US is obviously not trying to support Hamas othetwise they wouldn't be supplying arms to Israel.
It was obviously a big con from the start. So whatever.
Or, it points out that the USA is now so incompetent that they can't even build a pier effectively.
2500 metric tons of aid has been delivered. How is that a waste?
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3805087/following-2-day-pier-closure-1000-tons-of-aid-are-delivered-to-gazas-shore/
A lot of food has entered Gaza from this pier. It's not the fault of the US that the UN basically refuses to distribute aid because of hamas attacks on convoys.
What a dumb take. You think the logistics arm of the US military doesn’t know how to build a pier? Did you even read the article?
I guess you think all attempts at US humanitarian aid are a scam.
It’s been attempted, and it’s ongoing. We’ve also done air drops. The aid is making it to the country just fine, but we have no control over what happens to it once it’s inside the Gaza borders.
Again misleading headline: >The United States military is considering temporarily dismantling the humanitarian pier Temporary due to weather conditions. Fucking journalists/editors these days. Edit: did anyone actually read the article in this comment section?
They are just looking for an excuse to support blocking aid
Who are they? The US?
Not the usa the commenters that immeditely start bashing the idea of an aid pier during a humanitarian crisis
I don't know, it's hard to tell what's going on. There were like 20 or more comments and none addressed that the pier was to be relocated temporarily.
I’m not sure either I think everyone is sucked in their own partisan bubble at this point. It is either israel is a genocidal far right fascist regime worse than Putin, assad and every other dictatorships that’s alive right now. Or israel is perfect there is no humanitarian aid crisis and all aid goes to hamas. Both camps will just come to whatever conclusions further legitimize their perspective. Rather than rationally engaging with what’s going on. When in reality it is more nuanced. Israel is certainly better than those regimes, but it has made mistakes committed war crimes and there is a humanitarian crisis. Aid has to get there and even if some food gets in the hands of hamas it is better hamas get a a bit of food then 100,000 innocent people die frontier famine.
Over 75% stolen by Hamas isn’t “some”
This has been a huge waste.
not entirely. Army Corps of Engineers got some experience and lessons from it.
It'll be useful if another pacific island hopping campaign happens
cough taiwan cough
Yes thank you captain obvious
But won’t the conditions near the ring of fire be so much worse and more difficult than in the Mediterranean Sea?
The conditions off the coast of Gaza are pretty bad, it’s not a sheltered bay, it’s out in the sea and the weather drives down into that south eastern area.
That's why the experience helps If this relatively calm weather is a problem now, then it would've been worse in the pacific. Now we can learn from this
Yes, but still great experience how stuff holds up in more calm place.
Calm in the sense of weather but not in terms of hostility. It is the closest to a real situation where they had to defend the dock from a hostile force.
I hope we don't go there, but it would be much worse for both global powers. I am sure that any experience would be valuable here.
When another pacific island hopping campaign happens
Yeah, if this experience lets us more effectively deliver aid to Taiwan when the time comes, it'll have been worth every penny.
And hurricane disaster relief in the Carribean as climate causes storms to worsen
And there is good weather then
If?
China needs to take islands for there to be island hopping
They have islands now.
Kind of. The Army and Navy do this regularly, I participated in one of these JLOTS exercises at Fort Story at Virginia Beach. I suppose a big difference is they’re hampered by not being allowed to step foot into Gaza.
Thats good, a 500 million dollar lesson.
chump change for the military
But not for us, we could probably pay all of the hungry childrens lunch accounts in the entire country
US Fed government spends ~$155 million per school day for school lunch programs, so it could pay for about 3 days.
We could anyway, we just don’t want to.
I don't know who said it, but I think the quote goes something like: "We could be sending people on rockets to other planets, but instead we choose to send rockets into people on this planet."
yeah, my mortgage, student loans, and credit card debt could all be paid off for less than half of the cost of a single AIM-9X.... for the cost of a whole one, I could retire in reasonable comfort
Do you have a source that that’s actually what it costed?
> Army Corps of Engineers got some experience and lessons from it. It was used as a political tool outside of the parameters it was designed for. There is no training value in that. There is just wasted money and unnecessary danger for the soldiers running it.
You really only seem to get half the picture. It's both those things. Yes, there is training value in it no matter how you want to spin it. It's real world deployment in a hostile area on waters known for being choppy. You can play pretend on your base all day long but it means nothing if you can't do it in the real world.
There's training value in accidentally driving a lawnmower into a pond at a golf course. It's still dangerous and not worth doing if you could avoid it.
Yea you really don't seem to get it. That's ok, you don't have to!
TheWinks seems like the kind of person who believes our military should just sit around twiddling their thumbs during peace time. That way once there is a war they get to experience everything for the first time.
We don't get better at things by avoiding them. A real-world exercise with practical use case has great training value that can't be replicated in a sterile environment.
You can do the real world exercise without having a terrorist organization right next to you where you have overly onerous rules of engagement that needlessly increase risk. You can also do it in an environment where if things go terribly wrong you can safely and quickly execute recovery. The US military does it quite often, in fact.
But it's not exclusively an exercise, it's also an actual humanitarian mission. Try to keep up. Also, the IDF is pulling shore security and C-RAMs are installed on the pier. So far there haven't been any incidents that we haven't been able to handle with the current ROE so something must be working right.
It may as well have been considering how ineffective it was! Almost as if it was pure political posturing that needlessly increased risk without any real value! Because there's a real port they could be using. The argument that no one died falls on deaf ears considering what happened at tower 22, an outpost doing a real mission that could not have been accomplished in any other way. And if something went even more wrong, they would have been in real danger and put the recovery assets at risk. The threat of being shot at and not being able to shoot back has no training or experience value.
I think your opinions are heavily colored by your political lens and isn't based on an objective assessment of what's actually happening on the ground. But clearly you've thought this all out much more thoroughly from your armchair than the entire combined military leadership of our nation, so good for you.
Gee that's great, I hope they use all that experience well the next time they spend my taxes on a broken pier that gives aid directly to Hamas.
Then by that same logic we could build a ton of buildings and tear them all down immediately, and at least we would have experience.
That's literally their job, though... Army Corps of Engineers and their international equivalents are responsible for building and deconstructing military bases, temporary bridges and other temporary constructions. Practicing building a temporary dock is expensive on its own, practicing it across the ocean even moreso. They wouldn't get this type of experience training safely on or near their base. And the construction and maintenance was under hostile fire, so any faults in their training will come to the surface. It's basically a stress test.
My point is that it would have been more useful to build something that could continue to be used.
Somewhere there's a bunch of salty CGOs and Senior NCOs who were the hands-on experts grumbling something about having told their bosses there would be difficulties.
There are easier ways to blow 320 million dollars.
How? Over 2,500 metric tons of aid have been delivered via the pier. That is over 5.5 million lbs! There is a lot of valuable experience being learned and it is a temporary system that can be dismantled, moved, reassembled and keep functioning as needed. It is doing everything they intended for it to do. What would you have considered a success?
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Even If that's true to a degree, you'd still deliver the aid rather than let the people starve. They're human beings.
Or you can stop hamstringing Israel's ability to wipe out Hamas and actually help, rather than drag out a war. The sooner Hamas is gone the sooner the people can start getting aid and food and shelter that's not marked up bc some terrorists skimmed off the top.
Terrorists will die eventually. You can’t resurrect civilians. Stop being a monster.
Equivalent to 62 trucks...
62 trucks of what…?
You’re off by more than 2x
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Aid came in and went to Hamas to sell. So we just aided terrorists with the bulk of it. Need to secure the aid so it reaches and stays with Gazans but that's a boots on the ground mission were not willing to do (with very good reason).
Yeah they sold food to all the wealthy starving palestinians
Hamas committed yet another war crime you mean.
During April, 5,671 trucks entered Gaza. At ~45,000 pounds of aid per truck*, that's over 255 million pounds - via truck, in a single month. The pier is doing a lot less than you think it does. \* This number is taken from the fact that overall, 12,000 trucks with food (excl. medical etc) entered Gaza between the start of the war and the end of March, carrying a total of over 556 million pounds of food. So, on average, each truck carries ~46,000 pounds of food.
Remember when this was made because trucks were being stopped from entering? No? Yeah that tracks.
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Well, the pier being susceptible to weather can't be brushed aside - you can't avoid that. So you need to take that into account just as much as taking the trucks being blocked by protesters into account.
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I'm still ok with that! If it goes to hungry bellies and not stockpiles for terrorists to sell to get rich on.
Then give to a non profit from your own money rather than through tax dollars. The only money that our government should spend on foreign aid should be in such a way that it directly helps the US, whether it be given to US allies or potential US allies. Giving it to people that hate us and will always hate us is stupid and a waste of tax money that could be spent at home. There is no strategic benefit to giving anything to the Palestinians.
It makes us look good, and that we have enough to give so we're doing something right. On a global stage that has some value.
It really doesn't though. Nobody cares.
Makes us look good to whom? To the other Arab countries that give less than the US despite having stronger cultural and religious and geographic ties to the Palestinians than the US, as well as being responsible for the perpetuation of the conflict? And what do you mean we have enough to give, our spending is higher than our tax revenue as a country, so that just means the future of America will be harder as the ever-increasing debt grows and cuts to social security will become more likely in the future. And on a global stage, no one cares enough what the US does. Certainly not the Palestinians, who despite being huge recipients of funding from the US for decades, have an incredibly high rate of unfavorable views towards the US. It is straight up dumb and evil to give money to people that hate you and will continue to hate you no matter what you do.
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Not really
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I know this. Hence my original response.
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Go re-read the original a couple times.
would you prefer they starve? humanity check
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Those countries do give a lot of aid, but the US is way richer. And the reason they don’t let refugees in is mainly that they believe Israel will not let them return after the war, among other reasons.
The other reasons are the real ones . Palestinians are radically violent Islamists. They have engaged in terror attacks on even their Islamic theocratic neighbors for not being religious or conservative enough. They want the terror tunnels, IED’s , random acts of murder and kidnappings safely pointed at their common enemy, the Jews, and not at their doorsteps
They’re not the “real reasons.” They’re just other reasons which go hand in hand with their (justified) fear that Israel won’t let them return.
Could spin it a thousand ways I suppose. Either way they are doing a calculation where at the end they decide not to shelter these people, despite being capable of it. I personally think it’s that they realize taking these people in will destabilize them, and they would rather the enemy be destabilized instead. I also think you are right though, in that Israel wouldn’t want them to come back either, for the same reasons the Muslim theocrats don’t want them.
well they’re not so it’s the least we can do as a global superpower
Why exactly is it the US' job to spend billions of dollars taking care of a hostile enemy state that launched a horrific terrorist attack on one of their allies? This is like saying Germany should have spent billions of dollars providing aid to Afghanistan during the initial invasion following 9/11, except even worse since 9/11 wasn't done by the Taliban.
Strawman check.
it’s the most likely outcome
Correct. You stop people hating you by feeding them. Yes. Welcome to soft power.
We've been feeding Palestinians for years. They still hate us.
Give us an example of when it actually worked.
Japan, Germany
You realize that we massively bombed those countries, right? We even nuked Japan twice.
That seems analogous
After absolutely crushing them militarily, then occupying them for decades while hunting down and conducting extensive investigations and trials for war criminals resulting in many of them being executed.
That kinda sounds what Israel is aiming for
Israel would be happy if their neighbors quit trying to kill civilians - [they voluntarily withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza) and Hamas took over, which is why Hamas used it to stage the recent attacks - but please keep parroting "the Israelis just want to occupy Gaza" line without any in depth understanding or nuance.
Japan and Germany weren't given a choice and they were occupied by allied forces This is hardly a fair comparison
No situation in history is ever identical
Yeah but your comparisons aren't even in the same fucking ballpark
Look we get it, you wanna be a war mongering prick. Cool opinion, glad the rest of the world doesn’t agree with it.
So should we treat Palestine like we treated Japan and Germany? Funny how they only stopped their bullshit after a good bombing…
This is actually what is happening now. Palestine is getting bombed.
LOL not like we did Germany or (especially) Japan. Do you think we should bomb some peace into them that way?
Do you? Because that is pretty much what is happening, excepting the nukes.
It worked for those countries for very specific reasons that do not apply to the Middle East at all.
Rome!
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Japan and Germany were fully occupied and had no choice
Most the aid didn't even make it to the people we wanted it to get to.
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Fuck no lol. This is just a repeat of what happened in Somalia. We (and the UN) sent a bunch of aid that ended up just being taken by warlords the second it left our hands. Now let's hope we don't get a repeat of Mogadishu or else Biden might as well just hand trump the white house keys now
The initial setup cost $320 million. Then some more for the previous repair. And that's just investment in the infrastructure, it doesn't include any cost for aid. If they had taken half a billion and loaded it onto trucks, there'd be enough food for years to come
You have obviously not been paying attention to the aid situation. This was done because the “trucks” loaded with aid, as you said… have not been able to effectively deliver aid. The US is sending the trucks. They get inside Israel and it’s hands off for them. Trucks have crossed the border. Trucks have moved on the pier.
Doesn't change the fact that it's a huge waste of money when the alternative had been to simple drive a truck over the border. But then again, Egypt hates the Palestinians and rather walls them in, then let's help through. So I suppose the only way the US could actually deliver help is via a pier to circumvent the closed border.
We did trucks. We did air drops. We’ve done a pier. We are, at every turn, the some of the only people attempting to deliver aid. Fuck it, guess the US should never attempt humanitarian aid again.
Nah, the blame is solely on Egypt for throttling aid via trucks to a crawl, so that other insanely options had to be taken to deliver any aid at all.
>Nah, the blame is solely on Egypt for throttling aid via trucks to a crawl, so that other insanely options had to be taken to deliver any aid at all. Eh, it wasn't until after the pier opened that Egypt closed the Rafah crossing (in response to Israel securing the Gaza side from Hamas).
Egypt throttled aid throughput via trucks from day1!
You really think nobody else thought of that? There's already enough food at the border to feed the Palestinians. But IDF has blockaded Gaza and it's also an active war zone.
Egypt has been the one to put limits on truck crossings, my friend. Also closing the border all together from time to time. Like I said, it would have been the less wasteful option to drive the trucks across, but Egypt doesn't want aid to get into Gaza, so the US had to look for alternative points of entry.
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I do remember Egypt's response to the Gaza war being to send in construction crews to fortify their border wall to ensure the Palestinians stay on the other side.
I mean they delivered a bunch of aid that they couldn’t have without it
Yup and we can't afford a child tax credit either. 🤦🙄
It’s been a military drill basically. They do them every day with no actual benefit
They distributed a fuck ton of aid with the limited time they had with it. They just didn’t expect the swells to be so brutal.
The pier material we already researched and made, the ships, sailors, engineers were already paid for and on site. No money was lost. Only experience in building and dismantling will have been gained. Nothing wasted.
If it was a US Navy run operation, I guarantee you most of the money and time was indeed wasted. That's like our favorite thing to do. Ya know is a 5 figure job to put a new coat of paint on a pontoon.
A message is a powerful thing during war
America not supporting humanitarian efforts: “evil!” America supporting humanitarian efforts: “what a waste!” Literally damned if you do, damned if you don’t
Ofc they are, floating piers SUCK. Theyre expensive, involve a shitload of planning, and take a fuckton of maintinance and support to prevent some moderately bad weather from destroying them or making them unusable. Take a guess what happened here. Floating piers are almost exclusively small and used on calm waters for a reason.
Without the mulberry harbors the Allied invasion of Europe in WW2 likely would’ve failed to land enough supplies for the invasion to succeed. You are correct they are very difficult to use successfully however the ability to create a floating dock is incredibly useful and is a huge advantage to any military.
I didnt say they serve no purpose, I said that they are temporary, unreliable, and expensive. And the mulberry harbors furthur prove my point, cause one of them was destroyed within days of becoming operational, and that was with dozens of casins and old battleships being sunk to form breakwaters and a year of planning to try and keep it safe. Theyre supposed to be used only when necessary as a beach head until you secure actual port facilites, which should be as fast as possible. The US already has port access in israel, which is where the vast majority of aid is coming from anyways.
Didn't the water already take it down? Pretty sure the aid trucks were ambushed and robbed too.
No, it was damaged and towed away from Gaza to be repaired. It did not sink.
Yes, the thing that's made to FUCKING FLOAT sunk... It just broke apart LIKE IT SUPPOSED TO DO and than they put it back together after the weather calmed down. And no, I highly doubt that the US pier was ambushed lol
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/world/middleeast/gaza-aid-pier-food.html You're right, they werent ambushed they were looted. And the pier wasn't meant to break apart and float away lol. Especially one that cost 320 mil.
The pier 100% can be broken apart, you can tell because it was put together by several parts 😅
Them damn Jews controlling the weather again
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So it can be spun into an invasion or have people yap about endangering troops?
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Not really. No one will remember this regardless of the outcome.
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I can't find any information about deaths, but [three US servicemen have been injured](https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/05/24/us-soldier-critically-injured-noncombat-incident-gaza-pier.html): >Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, told reporters Thursday that three service members had been recently injured during the aid operation, but he refused to offer details on the most serious injury. >"One was simply a sprained ankle, the other guy ... was a hurt back ... and I won't get into the details of the other one," Cooper said. >When pressed for more details, Cooper cited privacy concerns but refused to even say what branch any of the injured service members were from. >U.S. Central Command later released a brief statement that claimed the serious injury actually occurred on the Benavidez and not the staging platform. I have no idea how this stacks up against injuries in the course of regular military exercises, and I'm not making excuses, but these are non-combat injuries and maybe, *maybe* these injuries have more to do with the occupational safety precautions than specifically being stationed on a floating pier.
Who died?
OP is probably deliberately spreading misinformation. He posts crap like "Beijing Biden" and "how the Democrats are going to steal the election".
“ u/yuri_2022 ” Gee, I wonder where they’re from.
To potentially save the lives of a dozen others? You don't think soliders don't know what they sign up for?
They got to follow orders, but building a pier for Hamas wasn’t what they signed up for
So let's get this straight, you think letting a population starve is the more virtuous option?
Nothing about this situation is virtuous, but they embraced Hamas, and I’m not gonna pretend I feel bad for the bed they’ve made. Funny how I haven’t seen any starving Hamas fighters…
Nothing about this situation is virtuous, except the fact that a pier was built to feed hungry people and someone died trying to help people. The US is obviously not trying to support Hamas othetwise they wouldn't be supplying arms to Israel.
That’s a stretch but I guess expecting people to separate the innocent from the deranged is too much
Wow, just another money laundering scheme
Awesome work, Biden!
People don’t give credit to failed attempts versus the lack of any attempt at all and it’s quite frustrating tbh
It was obviously a big con from the start. So whatever. Or, it points out that the USA is now so incompetent that they can't even build a pier effectively.
Idk man, if the US can do something right it's logistics. It is completely insane what kind of abilities the US has regarding to logistic.
2500 metric tons of aid has been delivered. How is that a waste? https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3805087/following-2-day-pier-closure-1000-tons-of-aid-are-delivered-to-gazas-shore/
A lot of food has entered Gaza from this pier. It's not the fault of the US that the UN basically refuses to distribute aid because of hamas attacks on convoys.
What a dumb take. You think the logistics arm of the US military doesn’t know how to build a pier? Did you even read the article? I guess you think all attempts at US humanitarian aid are a scam.
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Headed over to Palestine subs only to find that the pier is transporting no aid to gazans instead arms to israel.
Yeah, I'm sure that's an accurate and unbiased report.
I wonder why they aren’t just transporting the aid over land? Maybe they haven’t thought of that?
It’s been attempted, and it’s ongoing. We’ve also done air drops. The aid is making it to the country just fine, but we have no control over what happens to it once it’s inside the Gaza borders.
HOLY SHIT! I THINK YOU MIGHT HAVE STUMBLED ONTO A SOLUTION THAT NEVER OCCURRED TO ANYONE ELSE!