The U.S. Army, every few years, would break out a series of pontoons and boats and practice creating a pier where none existed before to land vehicles and cargo. It usually went pretty well, and it almost never generated any attention.

Sometimes, weather would get in the way, and so the last time the service successfully speared a pier into a beach was 2020. But it wasn’t a capability that drew a lot of attention.

That all changed in March when the system, known as the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, was hauled out for a mission facing intense international scrutiny — delivering aid to Gaza. While the pier would help offload nearly 20 million pounds of aid, a stream of issues, breakdowns, injured service members and delays have led to questions about the Army ability to build these piers and the health of the service’s watercraft community.

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There were the three injuries — including one so severe that the service member never returned to duty — the circumstances of which were never explained. The pier broke apart, leaving several Army boats and their crews stranded on the beach in Gaza. While the soldiers were evacuated fairly quickly, it took several days for the Israelis to return all the boats into the water.

But the pier concept isn’t just about delivering aid. It’s a capability that military strategists say could be key to fighting an island-hopping campaign in the Pacific.

Dr. Salvatore Mercogliano, a maritime historian and former merchant mariner who worked with JLOTS during the 1990s, stressed to Military.com that the Gaza mission “should be a warning bell for everybody about what a Pacific operation would look like.”

While politicians have focused on the cost of the system and the politics of using military forces to deliver aid to Palestinians, military experts have concentrated on the overall viability of the pier concept, and some are raising concerns that the Gaza mission exposed vulnerabilities that will become costly if JLOTS is ever deployed in combat.

The land service largely ignored its amphibious capabilities for decades with boats so old some engines were built in “West Germany,” according to a now-retired Army warrant officer who served on these vessels.

JLOTS missions are run by the 7th Transportation Brigade — sometimes dubbed “The Army’s Navy.”

The unit practices a mission similar to what it would execute in Gaza — putting a long pier onto a “bare beach” to offload vehicles and supplies. The unit last tried to execute the mission last year in Australia as part of Exercise Talisman Sabre after 14 months of careful preparations, but the effort ended up being scrapped due to rough weather.

Before that, a JLOTS pier was practiced in the United Arab Emirates in 2020 and South Korea in 2015. The 2015 exercise, the last time that a pier was successfully anchored into bare sand on a beach, took two attempts due to weather.

“I think it’s a critical capability going forward for the Department of Defense, and it’s got to be prioritized in sustainment, in modernization,” retired Col. Randy Nelson, once a commander of the 7th Transportation Brigade, told Military.com.

Nelson, in an interview Monday, conceded that “Mother Nature gets a vote” on the operations, but he argued that the unit has “a play to fix that and put it back in place. … That’s their job.”

Military officials told reporters at the start of the mission that the pier was expected to deliver up to 150 trucks of food or 2,000,000 meals per day. It’s not clear whether it ever reached that goal. Shortly after the pier began operating, Pentagon officials shifted to using “metric tons of aid” as their metric.

When Military.com asked Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, how many tons of aid a truck would carry or how many people a ton of aid would feed, he said the Pentagon would research the answer but never provided it. The result is that making a direct comparison to what was promised versus what JLOTS ultimately delivered is difficult.

After delays in getting set up, food was slow to flow across the pier. Then, it became clear that the Pentagon would be responsible for the aid only up to the point it reached the beaches of Gaza. Questions about whether the food was actually reaching Palestinians were passed off to the U.S. Agency for International Development or the United Nations’ World Food Program.

Those distribution efforts were stymied by security concerns and finally led Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh to concede in June that aid was “not flowing the way it should.”

Despite these issues, getting aid into Gaza through other routes was even more challenging and, at one point, the pier ended up providing the second-highest volume of aid from any entry point into Gaza.

“Twenty million pounds of aid on the beach is exactly why you brought the pier,” Nelson said. “The fact that you had to recover it, repair it, recover it, repair it and put it back in … it’s immaterial.”

While the Army ran into issues out of its control, such as choppy water, the mission’s lackluster impact raises questions over how the service can conduct more complicated water-based missions in a combat environment.

Both Nelson and Mercogliano argued that the Army shouldn’t be judged too harshly since it was asked to do a job under difficult conditions — namely, an inability to step foot on the beach.

“That really makes it difficult to do because you would have other methods to land cargo beyond just the Trident pier,” Mercogliano explained, referring to the pier connected to the Gaza shore that ended up breaking loose in rough seas and then being removed for the same reason three times. “You’d be able to bring watercraft right to the beach — you’d be able to do just a variety of different things.”

Creating a connection to shore would be critical for the Army if war broke out in the Pacific, with watercraft missions key to moving supplies to the front lines. Those capabilities haven’t been truly stressed in decades, and while the Gaza mission encountered challenges, such as choppy waters, combat in the Pacific would face those same obstacles but under more austere conditions.

“This was a high visibility, low threat test of the capability that we may actually need in a degraded environment in the Pacific in the future,” said Katherine Kuzminski, a defense expert at the Center for a New American Security, or CNAS, a national security think tank. “On the flipside, it was good we tested a capability that we don’t traditionally use to perhaps drive some improvements for combat environments.”

The Army has made an enormous evolution since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — with virtually every piece of gear a soldier uses seeing several upgrades, as well as new technology tactics making their way into every ground combat unit’s playbook. But its watercraft operations have been largely left to obscurity as the Global War on Terror mostly took place in landlocked terrain in the Middle East and those capabilities received little, if any, publicity.

“That really built up a culture of: hide our head in the sand, stay quiet, do the bare minimum we can to not get in trouble, and they won’t defund us,” the now-retired warrant officer said.

Amid this culture, problems festered, and the boats started to fall apart.

The officer said that, during his time in the community, he saw boats caked with rust and key parts that were impossible to get fixed because the manufacturers have all gone out of business.

“The Army doesn’t know what it wants to do with watercraft,” Mercogliano said. “They are always at the bottom of the totem pole and so they have been neglected at times in terms of resources [and] whether they want the program even to continue.”

The result of this resource shortage is that, according to the now-retired warrant officer, the crews struggle with keeping the boats in one piece.

The officer provided Military.com photos and emails that documented an issue with the bow ramp — the key component that allows a crew to easily roll cargo on and off the boat — on one boat that included serious issues with the hinge that connected it to the rest of the ship.

They also said that they had witnessed a bow ramp fall off of another Army landing craft while they were at sea and sink to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

“It’s not the soldiers, it’s not the command, it’s the equipment that needs to be invested in,” Nelson said.

In testimony to lawmakers in 2023, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth described the service’s watercraft as “niche,” but underscored those capabilities are much more relevant now and are in desperate need of a revamp as the service invests heavily in the Pacific.

Nelson detailed concerns regarding the service’s equipment in an Army-published article in 2014, writing that “forces lack the ability to meet current and emerging requirements.”

“Army forces lack a sufficient combination of speed, range and payload to rapidly shift combat-ready maneuver forces,” he added.

Despite the maintenance issues and the lack of clear investment from the Army, Mercogliano says that the system has value when it’s used in the right settings.

One example he cited was the system’s use in Haiti in 2010.

“It was a very good Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore operation because it was done in Port au Prince, you were in an enclosed harbor, you were replacing … facilities that had been destroyed by earthquake,” he said. “If you have the right operating environments, it works good.”

Related: Military Removes Gaza Aid Pier for Third Time as Lawmakers Call It a ‘Failed’ Operation

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