ComNavOps has been keeping an interested eye on the Gaza aid
pier (or causeway) as a moderately realistic simulation of a combat unloading
operation involving one component of the Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore (JLOTS). Would it work as advertised? How effective and efficient would it be?
Surprisingly, the pier has already been shut down.
So, what can we learn from the Gaza pier effort?
The first noteworthy aspect of the pier was how long it took
to build. President Biden announced the
pier on 7-Mar-2024 and construction was completed 17-May. That’s around a 70 day time frame. As a point of comparison, the Normandy
Mulberry Harbors were put into operation in less than two weeks despite being
hugely larger and more complicated and despite being done under combat
conditions.
It appears that the pier was in operation approximately 18
days out of its 30 days of existence.
That’s disappointing. That would
not effectively support an amphibious operation.
The next noteworthy aspect is the pier’s apparent
fragility. While weather can be severe
on any body of water, the Mediterranean is not exactly the North Atlantic or a
Pacific typhoon. I never heard a
detailed description of the weather conditions that disabled the pier but there
were no reports of any major storms. One
would have expected that such a key element of an amphibious assault would be a
good deal more robust.
… Pentagon announced the "Gaza pier" will be dismantled due to damage.[1]Here’s a time line of the pier:
- Mar 7 – Biden announces Gaza pier plan
- Mar 9 – U.S. Army support ship General Frank S. Besson leaves to begin construction
- May 17 - pier opens
- May 28 - pier ops suspended after piece breaks off
- Jun 8 - operations resume after repairs
- Jun 15 – Pentagon announces pier will be torn down
 |
| Mulberry Causeway |
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2024/06/15/rip-to-bidens-gaza-pier-as-he-chalks-up-another-foreign-policy-disaster-n2175519
Fragility: yes and it only had Mediterranean tides to deal with. I find:
ReplyDeleteLow 1:36pm. (0.37m)
High 8:03pm. (0.51m)
In other words the range is a few inches. Where I grew up it was, from boyhood memory, towards 30 feet quite often.
"the mean spring tidal range can be between 7 and 8m": say 8m mean so nearly 27' mean, so the highest range could indeed have been around 30' but perhaps that needed a sou'wester behind it.
Maybe the should have gotten some LSTs from museums...
ReplyDeleteI know you're kidding but consider how much more IMMEDIATELY effective an actual LST would be in humanitarian missions, being able to unload directly across a beach with no need for supporting facilities that are usually wrecked in a humanitarian disaster.
DeleteThe military should absolutely NOT be in the humanitarian and disaster relief business but some government agency, such as USAID, should obtain a few LSTs for the purpose.
On the other hand, where those disaster relief responses might be a real world test of competence in a particular military task - such as temporary piers for logistic support - they seem particularly useful.
DeleteThe Army has 35 Runnymede class LST like ships,
Delete350 ton capacity, 5x M1 tanks.
Interestingly, the typical WWII LST was rated at around 1900 ton capacity for tanks and vehicles.
DeleteActually, the Army already has 8 Besson class vessels which are not all THAT different from LSTs. According to Wiki, they can beach themselves and discharge 900 tons of vehicles and cargo across the shore (or 2000 tons to a pier as a cargo ship). From Wikipedia:
Delete"The vessel's cargo deck is designed to handle any vehicle in the US Army inventory and can carry up to 15 M1 Abrams main battle tanks or 82 ISO standard containers."
Although I do seem to recall there was a stipulation that American military folks were not to set foot on the shore, which may have been a problem with the pier and would also probably be a problem with the Besson ships.
"recall there was a stipulation that American military folks were not to set foot on the shore"
DeleteThat was a purely political and arbitrary constraint. There was no law or treaty or regulation that forbid it. This kind of self-imposed limitation is what we so often inflict on ourselves.
Note, I'm not saying that landing US personnel would have been a good idea - it wouldn't! However, what this should have told us is that if we can't do the job without self-crippling our capabilities then we shouldn't do the job or we should find some other way to do it that doesn't have limitations that hurt us.
In other words, the limitations were reality's way of telling us it was a bad idea ... and we didn't listen.
So, this thing operated for about twenty days (at best) for the very affordable price of what, $100M?
ReplyDeleteThe article I linked to in the post cited $320M and I suspect that's understated.
DeleteSoon enough, it will be cheaper for America to crush her targets to death with giant pallets of cash than to use the military.
DeleteThe key question is "When was the last time the army assembled this pier set?" 1973? This would be a great role for US Marines who are searching for some. The Army and Navy lack interest. Same with small boats.
ReplyDeleteI read somwhere that a second ship with pier parts experienced engine failure and had to return to the US a couple days out. A (the?) reason for the long build time?? It seems as if it was built with just enough manpower and material, with no room or contingencies to spare. Now setting aside the politics, and idiocy of doing it in the first place, and the absurd price tag, a peacetime mission like this should be penny-pinched. But during my time in, even though the USSR had just expired, we still overdid everything. We always carried twice as much of anything as we needed. We had a secondary plan for almost any circumstance, and we were never caught short handed or unprepared for anything as common as weather or bad luck. So Im admittedly unfamiliar with JLOTS, but if this was an op done in my day, and we were serious about making supplies flow into Gaza, we'd have built a pier and basically had a second one on hand. So is this another tell about how poorly our military functions today, or was this a halfhearted attempt to follow the CinCs orders that was happilly abandoned at first opportunity? Either way, its a national embarrassment. I can hear the Chinese laughing from here...
ReplyDeleteThe extremely long build times for the pier were due to the transit times of the US Army landing crafts used in the operation. The biggest problems during the operation were due to weather an distribution problems onshore. As far as I've seen when it worked quite well unloading pallets on trucks with a good rate, when it stopped working well it became useless.
ReplyDeleteThe first ship (Besson) left the US on 9-Mar and, along with other ships, arrived in Crete on 17-Apr. That's 40 days travel time.
DeleteConstruction began 26-Apr. That's a dead period of 9 days from arrival in the area to start of construction.
Construction finished 16-May. That's 21 days to build a single pier and connecting causeway.
Comparing those performances to the Normandy Mulberry Harbor construction times and taking into account the several orders of magnitude greater size and complexity of the Mulberry effort and the fact that it was done under combat conditions, I'd say the Gaza pier was an abject failure in terms of assembly. It was clearly an abject failure in ruggedness and longevity. It was slightly successful in terms of throughput when operational. According to Wiki, the Pentagon estimated that 1000 tons of supplies had been delivered in the 11 days of operation prior to the initial damage. That's 91 tons per day or 3.8 tons/hr. That seems like a pathetically small amount given that a single 20-ft TEU container can hold 23 tons. So, that would be roughly equivalent to 43 containers in 11 days or around 4 containers per day. To be fair, the delivery rate may have been constrained by factors other than capacity, such as politics, downstream handling, security, etc.
All in all, a very poor performance in terms of speed of response, construction, and throughput.
1,000 tons?
DeleteThat's about what a single World War Two LST could offload and it could do it a lot faster.
Don't know if the Gaza beach would allow an LST to offload directly but even with a short floating pier it should take more than a day or two.
This kind of time exposure in a combat scenario might explain why they keep saying amphibious assaults are a thing of the past.
Which isn't the same thing as saying someone more competent couldn't do it.
"Which isn't the same thing as saying someone more competent couldn't do it."
DeleteGlad you added that!
"3.8 tons/hr"
DeleteAs I recall, doing VERTREPS, a single lift would be roughly that much...
Funny how nobody thought of just doing that...
I also have been watching this deployment with interest and for the life of me can’t figure out the situation under which this contraption would be successful. The operational and environmental limitations appear to be quite severe.
ReplyDeleteAsk anyone who spends time around the coast and they’ll tell you it doesn’t take a whole lot to wreck a floating pier (or the like). Even the Normandy mulberrys were mostly destroyed in a storm, I recall, and they were built specifically with that sort of environment in mind. Waves and swell are extremely unforgiving. Maybe this works within an already well protected harbor, to stand up an offload pier where suitable facilities don’t exist? I don’t know.
Wishful thinking probably but I’m hoping this “test” encourages the DoD to pull the whole concept.
"I’m hoping this “test” encourages the DoD to pull the whole concept."
DeleteI'm hoping this convinces the DoD that any foreign invasion/assault REQUIRES a full, functioning port for logistics support (that was the goal of Normandy, after all). The Marines are the logical service to make port seizure their core mission.
Give the Marines the port seizure mission and make that their core mission. That's what I hope comes out of this fiasco.
From WKPD: 'The Mulberry B harbour at Gold Beach was used for 10 months after D-Day, and over 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles, and 4 million tons of supplies were landed before it was fully decommissioned.' ...
Delete'Mulberry "A" (American) was not as securely anchored to the sea bed as Mulberry "B" had been by the British, resulting in such severe damage during the Channel storm of June 19, 1944 that it was considered to be irreparable and its further assembly ceased'
That last point reminds me of a claim I saw somewhere "The principal enemy of the US Army is the US Navy". Or was it the other way round?
I think its worth noting that the American Mulberry - which was carefully designed and crafted to deploy on a specific mission at a very specific location whose environmental conditions were understood well in advance - still lasted less than two weeks.
DeleteThis sort of thing is hard to do right. It’s not easy as we might think it is and requires more effort to be successful than the military is giving it.
Even a Mediterranean storm is more calm than typical Pacific 8-10 foot swells but it broke apart a pier designed for an Indo Pacific fight against China.
ReplyDeleteFor $320 million, even the "expensive" methods of logistics could deliver the 2000 tons:
KMax Helicopter carries 1 ton at a time. 2000 sorties at $5k per sortie is $10 million and no risk of enemy fire to the crew because it is a unmanned.
Helicopters such as the Osprey or the CH53 can sling 5 to 7 tons. At around $40k per flight, the 400 flights required would have cost $16 million.
LSTs could have brought this ashore in 7 trips, but most beaches don't have the proper slope to offload the LST unless it is a roll-off vehicle.
Still, there were many cheaper options that would provide humanitarian support.
Lastly, the military does humanitarian missions because the State Department tasks the military to do it so they don't have to get their hands dirty. Why doesn't the State Department use their giant contracting officer corps to contract a civilian solution?
"contract a civilian solution"
DeleteThat's a great idea but what civilian company could provide the services?
One of the major problems is that such opportunities only happen once every few years or so. How would a civilian company sustain itself with that low a frequency of contracts?
I agree, I don’t see a contract solution here for those reasons. Plus we’re not ordering paper here, if the DoD sees this as a critical mission capability, they should own it and figure it out.
DeleteOne way to improve the chance of this sort of pier holding up might be to pair with some sort of breakwater. You need something to help mitigate the wave action.
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn’t guarantee the pier’s survival in all conditions (no amount of hardening would survive a typhoon) but it would help improve its chances of being around awhile.
No expert but didn’t the Allies sink old ships for this purpose off Normandy? Maybe we finally found something the LCS could be good at! :).
I spent a couple decades working for Bechtel - we could have done this no sweat - not even a serious project - no one ever intended this to work.
ReplyDeleteThis whole thing was total bs imo - even if it hadda worked and stayed afloat it would have been a drop in the ice bucket. Whole floating pier thing was 100% PR from the get go imo.
If you want to get relief into a place like that you gotta truck it in.
Why don’t the press do their jobs and report this stuff properly like they used to do in Vietnam days? Showing my age here, right?