So the pier that was put in place by the US Navy to provide a mooring so that ships could unload “aid” to Gaza was unsuited for the “Rough Seas” and broke apart.…
Broke up in the waves.
It will have to be pulled off and sent off for repair. After only 3 weeks on station. Surely they knew that weather might be an issue? I mean, this wasn’t a hurricane, just a normal storm.
This is a sad reflection of the capabilities of the US Navy, a bad reflection of the folks who planned the whole scheme.
What a waste of our money.
A floating pier design, made to facilitate landings all over the world, that can’t handle the little waves of the Mediterranean Sea.
We’ve fallen so far that we can’t repeat the floating harbors at the Normandy beaches in 1944 that were made out of huge barges. Or the floating harbors used all over the Pacific starting in 1943.
Ya gotta wonder who screwed this up – Did some military engineer say that this would not work in this situation but some DEI brass or maybe the White House over-road the decision and said do it anyway – Or has our military really become this incompetent?
We are THE laughingstock of the world – Thanks to Bush Obama & Biden.
The Chinese and Russians are not afraid of us and will run roughshod over whoever they desire. My money is on China going into Taiwan within 90 days and Russia crushing Ukraine and keeping the parts they want by the end of summer.
It wasn’t a waste of money…well in the traditional sense of “normal” it was.
But using the progressive normal; it was a grand and glorious opportunity for “connected ” companies to donate to democratic causes.
WTF are you talking about? The floating pier cost the US taxpayers $320 Million to assemble and float to shore. God knows how much it will cost to repair.
No.
$320M was spent from taxpayer funds, sure.
Which put $320M into connected crony companies’ hands.
Which gets a non-zero fraction of it funneled right back to election campaigns and Leftard PACs by “donations” from those companies to the [D] congressweasels that appropriated the money in the first place. (And the [R]s do the same thing, for the same reason.)
And some of the money actually pays salaries and buys materials from Americans.
It’s not like we parachuted a pallet of $320M into Gaza with a card that said “To Hamas, with love”, right? (Unlike idiotic Iranian deals, where we did exactly that.)
This is just the usual D.C. self-greasing axle.
And don’t overlook what I outlined below, either.
A $320M “failure” is a lot cheaper than an endless $1B+ annual commitment. This may have been the best $320M investment in the region we’ve made in years if it was done to only look good, without getting us stuck there do-gooding in perpetuity.
Don’t overlook the “crazy like a fox” answer.
We needed to look even-handed? Okay, challenge accepted.
So we send people there to build a half-assed fornication that we know is going to fail (or was explicitly designed to do so), for 87 reasons (at least 5 of them because they were told by TPTB to do it wrong on purpose, or just conveniently wrote the specs in a way it couldn’t help but fail), and then when it does exactly that, we wash our hands of Gaza and say, “Hey, sorry, we tried our best… Too bad, so sad, B’bye.”
Now we’re morally off the hook, and they’re left trying to terrorist-‘splain their continued terrorism, intransigence, and humanitarian crisis, while they eat rockets and bombs by the metric ton every hour.
Maybe somebody in Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon learned something from the myopicly stupid Beirut PLO salvation debacle in 1983 after all.
And it’s very easy, in such a lose-lose situation, to camouflage sabotage as incompetence, shrug, and walk away.
“Oh please, B’rer Bear, don’t throw me into dat der briar patch!