The Pentagon said Thursday that nearly half of the troops it deployed to the Mediterranean as part of the mission to deliver aid to Gaza via a temporary pier are either home or will be home shortly.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters that 235 soldiers returned to Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia earlier this month, and another roughly 100 are expected to return in the coming days. Singh also said that 209 sailors returned home to California last week.
In all, the more than 500 troops represent about half of the total forces who were deployed in the spring on a mission that aimed to bring more aid into war-torn Gaza but ended up becoming a point of controversy and a political lightning rod as it was repeatedly disrupted.
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According to Singh, the remaining forces are still working on delivering the approximately 6 million pounds of remaining aid to the Palestinian people.
"We expect all personnel and equipment to be coming home by mid-September, as soon as that aid is distributed," Singh told reporters Thursday.
The pier, known as Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, began operations in May with the expectation of delivering up to 150 trucks of food, or 2,000,000 meals per day. But weather delays limited the number of days it was actually able to function and, shortly after the pier began operating, Pentagon officials shifted to using "metric tons of aid" as their measure of success, making any effort at a direct comparison to what was promised versus what was ultimately delivered very difficult.
Security concerns within Gaza also meant that food was slow to flow across the pier, and the Pentagon passed off questions about whether the food was actually reaching Palestinians to the U.S. Agency for International Development or the United Nations' World Food Program.
Singh conceded in June that aid was "not flowing the way it should."
Despite those 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.
By mid-July, when the mission formally ended, Vice Adm. Brad Cooper told reporters that the pier, despite having been operational "for a little more than 20 days," delivered 19.4 million pounds of aid.
Experts who spoke to Military.com after the mission's end argued that the Army shouldn't be judged too harshly about the pier's performance since troops were asked to perform a mission under difficult conditions -- namely, an inability to step foot on the beach.
As troops return home, the next step for Army officials who oversee the JLOTS system is to decide on its future.
The rare, high-profile outing has revealed that, while the capability is valuable and could be crucial in a war with China, it is in desperate need of investment.
Soldiers who have operated the system have specifically noted that JLOTS went underfunded during the Global War on Terror and its ships are now in desperate need of maintenance and replacement.
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