The Pentagon said Thursday that nearly half of the troops it had deployed to the Mediterranean Sea via a makeshift pier as part of the aid delivery mission to Gaza were either home or would arrive shortly.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters that 235 troops returned to Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia earlier this month and about 100 more are expected in the next few days. Singh also said that 209 sailors returned to California last week.
In total, the more than 500 soldiers represent about half of the total force deployed in the spring for a mission aimed at getting more aid to the war-torn Gaza Strip. But the mission became a point of contention and political flashpoint as it was repeatedly disrupted.
Read more: The Army is firing another senior noncommissioned officer in the Washington, DC area
Singh said the remaining forces are still working to deliver the remaining aid, worth about £6 million, to the Palestinian people.
“We expect all personnel and equipment to return home by mid-September once the aid is distributed,” Singh told reporters on Thursday.
The pier, known as Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, began operations in May and was designed to deliver up to 150 truckloads of food, or 2,000,000 meals, per day. However, weather-related delays limited the number of days the pier was actually operational, and shortly after the pier began operations, Pentagon officials switched to using “metric tons of supplies” as a measure of success, making any attempt to directly compare what was promised with what was ultimately delivered very difficult.
Security concerns in Gaza also meant that food deliveries across the pier were slow, and the Pentagon referred questions about whether the food was actually reaching the Palestinians to the U.S. Agency for International Development or the United Nations World Food Program.
Singh admitted in June that aid was “not flowing as it should.”
Despite these difficulties, transporting aid to Gaza via other routes proved even more difficult. At one point, the pier carried the second largest volume of aid of any entry point into Gaza.
In mid-July, when the mission officially ended, Vice Admiral Brad Cooper told reporters that although the pier had only been in operation for “a little over 20 days,” it had already delivered £19.4 million in supplies.
Experts who spoke to Military.com after the mission ended argued that the pier’s performance should not be judged too harshly by the Army, as troops were asked to perform a mission under difficult conditions – namely, the inability to set foot on the beach.
As troops return home, the next step for Army officials who oversee the JLOTS system is to decide its future.
This rare, high-profile appearance demonstrated that while this capability is valuable and could be crucial in a war with China, it urgently needs investment.
Soldiers who operated the system have specifically pointed out that JLOTS was underfunded during the Global War on Terror and its ships are now in dire need of maintenance and replacement.
Related: While the Gaza pier is packed, experts worry about the possible consequences of a war in the Pacific
The story continues
