But that day heralded the start of a great upending for the U.S. Navy, after Hamas militants streamed into Israel and murdered more than 1,200 people, sparking a war that continues to threaten to engulf the Middle East to this day.

The moment that would change the Navy forever actually took place aboard the Carney 12 days later, on Oct. 19, when it became the first American warship to take out a barrage of Iran-backed Houthi rebel missiles and drones fired from Yemen.

Such intercepts have since become a harrowing, near-daily occurrence for destroyers in those waters, and the year that followed Oct. 19, 2023, has irrevocably changed the Navy for the foreseeable future, Navy leaders and outside analysts say.

On this day one year ago, starting around 4 p.m. local time, Carney took out a Houthi attack the Pentagon later said was headed for Israel, downing 15 drones and four land-attack cruise missiles over 10 hours.

While their pre-deployment training prepared them for anything, the Carney was not expecting to find itself taking on the Houthis in a near-daily battle to keep the claustrophobic Red Sea lanes open for commerce, Cmdr. Jeremy Robertson, the ship’s commanding officer for that cruise, told Navy Times this week.

“None of us really could have known what we were going to get into once Oct. 7 happened,” he said.

Since those fateful 10 hours a year ago, the Red Sea has become the arena for the longest sustained “direct and deliberate attacks at sea” that the fleet has faced since World War II, Fleet Forces Command head Adm. Daryl Caudle said in a statement to Navy Times.

“While I could not have predicted the complexity and interrelationships of all that has transpired since [Oct. 19, 2023], I am not surprised,” said Caudle, who commands the Navy East Coast-based fleet.

“The world is a very tense place right now given the vast range of power-seeking agendas between peer competitors and opportunistic regional proxies. Any small spark can have serious consequences, which is why we take every situation so seriously.”

Since Carney’s first victory, the surface fleet has subsequently honed its tactics and tuned its radars for such a fight, instances when a ship’s Combat Information Center sometimes has mere seconds to ascertain and take out a Houthi attack.

Combat lessons are being routed back to schoolhouses and training centers, giving the Navy real-time knowledge on its combat systems and how to best use them.

Skippers also report that their crews have been galvanized by such experiences, finding meaning to their seemingly endless training in the life-and-death minutes they endure in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

“This really gave our sailors the why,” Robertson said. “Why do we train so hard, why do we do all the reps and sets.”

“The stage was not too big, the lights were not too bright. They were able to draw a connection.”

These successes at sea “validate our readiness to respond, our Sailors’ warfighting spirit and the technological superiority of our exquisite combat systems,” Caudle said.

But despite the tactical successes and demonstrated proficiencies, some question how fast the Navy is burning through munitions, sometimes to take out cheap Houthi drones, and whether a drawdown of missiles could one day impact a long-feared war with China in the West Pacific.

The Houthi menace in the Middle East has also caused the Navy’s aircraft carriers to be run hard, and some have been scrambled to the region when others weren’t ready to go, further raising readiness alarms in some corners.

And while tactical battles have been won, strategic wars have not, according to James Holmes, a retired Navy gunnery officer and professor of maritime strategy at the Naval War College.

“The tacticians have done their work magnificently … and the combination of sensors, fire control and weaponry has performed as advertised against an array of threats similar to what [Iran, Russia and China] field,” Holmes told Navy Times. “Bringing down anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles is no easy feat, but they have done it.”

And while such successes will reverberate on other maritime battlefields, the Navy to date has been unable to stop the Houthis from attacking merchant vessels traveling through the vital economic waterway that is the Red Sea, he said.

“The failure part is that the mission has fallen short of its strategic goal, namely allowing merchant shipping through the Gulf of Aden, Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and Red Sea to resume unmolested,” Holmes said. “We can flip strategic failure to success when shipping firms — and the all-important maritime insurance companies — feel comfortable enough to start using that route again.”

A year in, the Navy is getting more judicious about how it fights Houthi attacks, according to Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst at the Hudson Institute think tank.

Navy ships threw the “kitchen sink” at incoming drones and missiles after the Carney’s first intercept a year ago, but the fleet is becoming more adept at using electronic warfare, guns and less-expensive interceptors to counter such Houthi attacks, Clark said.

Questions of sustainability of effort are now arising, he said, noting that the Navy has in some instances used carrier-based fighter jets to shoot down Houthi drones and missiles, an expensive and inefficient approach.

“The challenge going forward will be how to sustain this level of presence in the region,” Clark said. “The Pentagon may need to consider putting missile defense systems on barges or ashore so [destroyers] can deploy elsewhere or return home for maintenance.”

Robertson left the Carney after it returned to Mayport, Florida, in May, and is now the Navy’s Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training, or SWATT, director, passing on his hard-earned knowledge.

“It’s certainly surreal,” he said of his time commanding Carney. “I love every one of the sailors and officers and chiefs I worked with. Just a great crew. They’ll remember this for the rest of their lives.”

As the one-year anniversary of Oct. 19 comes and goes with no end in sight for the Navy’s Red Sea fight against the Houthis, Caudle noted that it’s difficult to forecast how the conflict will end.

“While I won’t speculate on how our involvement with the Houthis will culminate, I can tell you that I’m laser-focused on readiness, sustainment and lethality,” he said. “We’re ready for this fight, no matter how long it lasts.”

Navy leaders this week identified an aircraft carrier and two submarines affected by faulty weld issues during work at the Newport News Shipyard in Virginia, but say that the substandard work did not take place on components that affect ship safety or operations.

In a letter to House and Senate armed services committee members Thursday, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said impacted ships include the recently-revamped aircraft carrier George Washington and the brand-new attack submarines Hyman G. Rickover and New Jersey.

Citing shipyard officials, Del Toro wrote that the issue involved “welders who did not follow welding procedures properly.”

“Importantly, the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) has assessed that the welds were not on components or systems that affect ship safety or operations,” he wrote. “NAVSEA, as the technical warrant holder, has determined the ships are safe to operate.”

Del Toro wrote that he first became aware of the issue on Sept. 24.

The Navy had identified those three vessels as having been impacted as of Thursday, and Del Toro’s memo states that the sea service is examining welds on 23 ships under construction or in maintenance to see if faulty welds there may impact future operations.

Last week, officials with HII, the company that owns Newport News Shipbuilding, acknowledged that “some welders knowingly circumvented certain welding procedures” while working on military vessels.

“Malicious intent” was ruled out as a the source of the problem, HII said in a statement.

“Upon discovery of some welders not consistently following procedures, we followed our protocol, took action to communicate with our customers and regulators in a timely manner and began working the issue with the Navy,” the company said in an additional statement Friday.

The Department of Justice is investigating the matter, lawmakers confirmed this week.

Del Toro promised to cooperate with that probe and wrote Thursday that the Navy “is evaluating all legal options, and reserving our rights accordingly.”

Congressional leaders have pushed the Navy this week for more answers on the scope of the problem and how it was allowed to happen.

“These vessels are critical to U.S. defense,” House Armed Services Committee members wrote to Del Toro this week. “We must ensure that these vessels are protected against any bad actors seeking to put U.S. national security or our service members at risk.”

The Newport News yard is one of two in the United States focused on the nuclear fleet. The yard constructs parts of several submarine classes, as well as Ford-class aircraft carriers.

While the timeframe of the faulty welds has not been disclosed, George Washington left the Newport News yard in May 2023 following its midlife maintenance overhaul that began in 2017 and was originally supposed to wrap in 2021. Officials blamed the delays on extra unanticipated work during the so-called refueling and complex overhaul, or RCOH.

The carrier is currently underway in the Pacific Ocean and on its way to its new home port in Japan.

The submarine Hyman G. Rickover was commissioned in October 2023, while New Jersey was just commissioned on Sept. 14.

In the memo, Del Toro promised a full review of operations at the shipyard to ensure the welding problems do not occur again.

“The safety of our sailors and ships is of paramount importance,” he wrote. “We have given top priority to the task of defining and examining the scope of improper welds conducted on operational in-service ships, and I have directed my Navy technical experts to co-locate with the shipyard immediately to support a thorough review.”

Lawmakers demanded answers from the U.S. Navy on Friday over news reports that faulty welds may have been knowingly made to American submarines and aircraft carriers under construction at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia.

The revelations were first reported by U.S. Naval Institute News.

Few details about the matter were made public Friday, including the potential risks to sailors serving aboard the impacted ships, or whether those ships would become unavailable for operations due to the bad welds.

In a statement late Friday, HII, the company that owns the shipyard, said it had discovered “through internal reporting that some welders knowingly circumvented certain welding procedures.”

“Based on our initial investigation, there is no indication of malicious intent,” the company said. “Upon discovery, we took action to communicate with our customers and regulators, investigate, determine root causes, bound the issue, and put in place immediate corrective actions as we work through longer-term solutions.”

The company’s statement did not include further information on the corrective actions or longer-term solutions taken.

Earlier Friday, in a joint statement, the Republican and Democrat heads of the House Armed Services Committee called reports of the faulty welds “deeply concerning.”

“The Department of Defense needs to immediately provide our committee with answers and a plan for how they will protect U.S. Navy vessels against tampering,” the statement by committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., states. “Absolute transparency with Congress is essential.”

The ranking member of the committee’s Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee said in a statement that members were “already in close contact with Navy leadership to ascertain the scope and severity of the weld quality issue.”

“Anytime there is a weld defect on Navy ships and submarines, the safety of the crews that serve aboard are put at risk, and the availability of these platforms are impeded,” subcommittee ranking member Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said. “It is imperative that Navy leadership disclose its investigation in a timely manner in the coming weeks.”

The Navy said Friday that it was “aware of the issue and a thorough evaluation is underway to determine the scope.”

“The safety of our Sailors and our ships is of paramount importance,” the sea service said. “We are working closely with industry partners to address this situation and will provide additional information when available.”

The Newport News yard is one of two in the United States focused on the nuclear fleet.

The yard constructs parts of several submarine classes, as well as Ford-class aircraft carriers.

HII did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Military Times, but USNI News reported that the company had reported the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The ground control station was part of a multiyear effort that took place aboard Bush during multiple ship maintenance stints and between deployments, Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, said.

Along with the required software and hardware, the drone nerve center features the first fully operational and integrated unmanned carrier aviation mission control system that the command says is critical to using the Stingray in operations.

Bush will conduct at-sea testing of the center early next year, according to NAVAIR.

The control station is the latest step toward getting the Stingray into the fleet, where it will refuel fighter jets midflight, helping the sea service’s strike arm to stay airborne longer — a capability that would be particularly helpful should war with China break out in the watery expanse of the West Pacific.

Standing up the Bush’s drone control room “lays the foundation” for how the Navy will operate and control unmanned aircraft, Unmanned Carrier Aviation (PMA-268) Program Manager Capt. Daniel Fucito said in a statement.

While such systems will initially support the Stingray, they will also be used for other services’ unmanned systems, such as the Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft program, which seeks to pair air drones with unmanned aircraft in a so-called “air wing of the future.”

Such systems are also being planned for installation aboard fellow carriers Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan beginning in fiscal 2025, according to NAVAIR.

Palestinian civilians were dying five months into the Israel-Hamas war. Most of the territory was struggling to get food or near famine. And Israel wasn’t opening more land routes for assistance to flow in.

So the U.S. would make a route of its own.

“This temporary pier would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day,” Biden said during his State of the Union speech.

Instead, four months later, the pier’s mission is over and its clearest legacy is what wasn’t possible.

Despite the work of 1,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors using the Joint-Logistics-Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, capability, the pier couldn’t stay afloat for long due to choppy seas. And while it got aid into the Gaza Strip, it couldn’t fix another intractable problem: actually getting it to the Palestinian people — 96% of which face “acute food insecurity,” according to the United Nations World Food Programme.

The Pentagon estimated the pier would cost $230 million, though the final number isn’t yet certain, and Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, said it would come in well under budget.

A clearer cost has been to U.S. personnel: One soldier remains in the hospital due to a pier-related mishap in May, and is still recovering stateside.

Citing privacy regulations, DOD officials have declined to explain what injured the soldier and two other service members, who were able to return to duty after the incident.

U.S. officials have defended the mission as the safest and most efficient way to get American assistance into Gaza during the war. And they can cite almost 20 million pounds of aid as evidence.

“The pier has done exactly what we intended it to do,” said Cooper.

Many watching from the sidelines in Washington disagree.

The pier arrived at a moment of acute political pressure on the White House to help the Palestinian people, said Steven Cook, an expert on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Despite that, he said, it’s become an emblem of what the U.S. hasn’t learned in the region.

“This is a constant theme in American foreign policy in the Middle East,” he said. “Despite our best intentions, we didn’t really understand what we were walking into.”

‘I was hopeful that would be more successful’

When announcing that the pier was being dismantled, military officials came with a list of statistics. The JLOTS pier delivered 19.4 million pounds of aid, or enough to feed half a million Palestinians for one month.

By comparison, the U.S. has sent 2.4 million pounds via air drops and 33 million pounds via land crossings since the start of the war in October.

In its 20 days of operating, the admiral said, it carried double or triple the amount of aid the U.S. initially expected. Altogether, it was the most humanitarian support America has ever sent to the Middle East.

“That data stands on its own,” Cooper said.

And yet, those numbers have another side. The aid may have gotten onto Gazan territory, but much of it hasn’t reached people in need. Due to rough weather, the pier was in service only about one-third of the time since it was first anchored in May. At one point, it buckled under rough seas and had to be repaired in the Israeli city of Ashdod.

Meanwhile, crowds ransacked at least one aid-laden truck coming from the pier before it could get to distribution points, The Associated Press reported, and the United Nations halted aid distribution at times due to security concerns.

“You can have the best fighting force in the world and the best logisticians in the world, but high seas and strong winds still create quite a dilemma,” said Brad Bowman, who researches U.S. defense policy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

After the NATO summit in July, even Biden acknowledged that the pier could have performed better.

“I was hopeful that would be more successful,” he said.

A JLOTS test case

Still, using the pier in a real-world combat zone likely helped prove its use to the Pentagon, argued Keith Robbins, a retired Army officer who oversaw the JLOTS program for U.S. Transportation Command before his retirement in 2007.

JLOTS is, in essence, a set of metal pieces that can be assembled in multiple ways. It’s meant for calmer waters than the eastern Mediterranean Sea, Robbins said, but there were few better options for the mission itself: quickly shuttling tons of aid onshore.

“JLOTS is the perfect capability to handle that, but it has to be put in the right place in order for it to be successful,” he added.

Now that JLOTS has made its debut in a combat zone, Robbins hopes it will convince the Pentagon to continue funding it.

“Ten, 15 years ago, when I was doing it, the higher-ups didn’t really understand what the capability was,” he said. “I would hope that this has been a great illustration of how valuable this capability can be.”

‘The needs are staggering’

In their briefing last week, CENCTOM deputy commander Cooper and an official from USAID argued the pier hadn’t only finished its mission — it was also no longer necessary.

The maritime supply route was now moving from off the 25-mile Gazan coast to Ashdod, Israel, where aid will enter the strip via trucks.

As the U.S. and humanitarian groups have said for months, there is no substitute for these land crossings.

“The needs are staggering and continue to grow,” said Solani Korde, a USAID official, briefing alongside Cooper.

From the start, U.S. officials stressed that the pier was “temporary.” In other words, the U.S. was not committing to an indefinite mission attached to Gaza, and it wasn’t suggesting this path could replace others.

“A maritime route is not a zero-sum discussion,” said Chris Hyslop, a former U.N. official who now works with Fogbow, a humanitarian advisory group that assisted the pier’s mission.

But even when aid crosses into Gaza it has been extremely hard to deliver. Roads are damaged. Swathes of territory are dangerous. And the actors involved — from Egypt to Israel to Hamas to other groups in Gaza — often don’t have reason to distribute aid quickly, whether due to cronyism, domestic politics or the terrorist group’s total-war strategy, said Cook, the analyst at CFR.

“That is really, chiefly, the obstacle to ensuring that the innocent people of Gaza get the lifesaving food, water, medicine that they need,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in a July briefing. “It’s distribution within as opposed to distribution from without.”

No pier or new land crossing can solve that problem. But while the pier’s mission may be over, some involved don’t think the maritime route should close.

Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon Middle East official who also works at Fogbow, the aid group, said the pier was a proof of concept, despite its limitations.

“I think it needs to be continued because quite frankly, the mechanism in Cyprus [where aid was sorted] and the aid delivery zone is already established,” he said. “If we don’t put something in its place that will be for naught.”

The unprecedented announcement, delivered less than four months before the election, immediately upended a campaign that both political parties view as the most consequential in generations.

The president — intent on serving out the remainder of his term in office — quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take on Trump and encouraged his party to unite behind her, making her the party’s instant favorite for the nomination at its August convention in Chicago.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, nominated by Biden in late 2020, praised Biden as “an extraordinary guardian of America’s national security” in a statement Sunday.

“I am deeply grateful for his leadership and statesmanship,” Austin said. “He has a secure place in American history as one of our great foreign-policy presidents.”

Biden’s Sunday announcement is the latest jolt to a tumultuous campaign for the White House, coming a week after the attempted assassination of Trump at a Pennsylvania rally.

A party’s presumptive presidential nominee has never stepped out of the race so close to the election. President Lyndon Johnson, besieged by the Vietnam War, announced in March 1968 that he would not seek another term after just a single state’s primary. Biden’s July decision comes after more than 14 million Democrats cast votes supporting him through the primary process.

Harris, in a statement, praised Biden’s “selfless and patriotic act” and said she intends to “earn and win” her party’s nomination.

“I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party — and unite our nation — to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda,” she said.

Biden’s decision to bow out came after escalating pressure from his Democratic allies to step aside following the June 27 debate, in which the 81-year-old president trailed off, often gave nonsensical answers and failed to call out the former president’s many falsehoods.

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” Biden wrote in a letter posted Sunday to his X account.

Nearly 30 minutes after he delivered the news that he was folding his campaign, Biden threw his support behind Harris.

“Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” he said in another post on X. “Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump.”

There were early signs that the party was moving to coalesce around Harris, who scored the endorsements of the Congressional Black Caucus and former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even before she had commented on Biden’s decision to quit the race. But notably, former President Barack Obama held off, pledging support behind the eventual party nominee.

“We are honored to join the President in endorsing Vice President Harris and will do whatever we can to support her,” former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a statement.

But Obama, who had privately shared doubts about Biden’s reelection chances, stopped short of endorsing Harris even as he praised Biden for his decision to leave the race.

“I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges,” he said in a statement.

Biden’s decision came as he has been isolating at his Delaware beach house after being diagnosed with COVID-19 last week, huddling with a shrinking circle of close confidants and family members about his political future. Biden said he would address the nation later this week to provide “detail” about his decision.

Harris found out about Biden’s plans on Sunday morning and senior campaign and White House staff were notified just minutes before the letter went out, according to people familiar with the matter who commented on the private discussions on condition of anonymity. Biden had been reflecting on his future for the past couple days and the decision was closely held.

Now, Democrats have to urgently try to bring coherence to the nominating process in a matter of weeks and convince voters in a stunningly short amount of time that their nominee can handle the job and beat Trump. And for his part, Trump must shift his focus to a new opponent after years of training his attention on Biden.

The decision marks a swift and stunning end to Biden’s 52 years in electoral politics, as donors, lawmakers and even aides expressed to him their doubts that he could convince voters that he could plausibly handle the job for another four years.

Biden won the vast majority of delegates and every nominating contest but one, which would have made his nomination a formality. Now that he has dropped out, those delegates will be free to support another candidate.

Harris, 59, appeared to be the natural successor, in large part because she is the only candidate who can directly tap into the Biden campaign’s war chest, according to federal campaign finance rules.

Biden’s campaign formally changed its name to Harris for President, reflecting that she is inheriting his political operation — a sign of the leg up she has in the race for the Democratic nomination. Democratic groups, including the Democratic National Committee, also filed paperwork changing the names of their joint fundraising committees to reflect Harris’ candidacy.

The Democratic National Convention is scheduled to be held Aug. 19-22 in Chicago, but the party had announced it would hold a virtual roll call to formally nominate Biden before in-person proceedings begin.

It remained to be seen whether other candidates would challenge Harris for the nomination. The Democratic National Committee’s chair, Jaime Harrison, said in a statement that the party would “undertake a transparent and orderly process” to select “a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November.”

Harris was spending Sunday afternoon calling Democratic elected officials and delegates as she works to lock up the nomination.

Harris received her first delegates for the Democratic presidential nomination on Sunday. The Tennessee Democratic Party posted on X that its delegation voted during a meeting Sunday to back Harris after Biden’s departure from the campaign.

Trump reacted to the news in a post on his Truth Social site, in which he said Biden “was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve.”

“We will suffer greatly because of his presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly,” he added. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

While Trump and his team had made their preference for facing Biden clear, his campaign had nonetheless ramped up its attacks on Harris as pressure on Biden to step down intensified.

Democratic officials, including many who were behind the effort to push Biden from the race, quickly released statements praising Biden’s decision.

“His decision of course was not easy, but he once again put his country, his party, and our future first,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “Joe, today shows you are a true patriot and great American.”

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York praised Biden as “one of the most accomplished and consequential leaders in American history.”

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said Biden should immediately resign if he is not fit enough to run for office. In a statement, Johnson said, “November 5 cannot arrive soon enough.”

In addition to his planned address to the country, Biden still intends to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House this week, according to a person familiar with the president’s schedule who was not authorized to comment publicly.

The exact timing of the meeting is still not set in stone as Biden continues to recover from COVID. Netanyahu is scheduled Wednesday to deliver an address to Congress and he is also expected to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris while in Washington.

In 2020, Biden pitched himself as a transitional figure who wanted to be a bridge to a new generation of leaders. But once he secured the job he spent decades struggling to attain, he was reluctant to part with it.

Biden was once asked whether any other Democrats could beat Trump.

“Probably 50 of them,” Biden replied. “No, I’m not the only one who can defeat him, but I will defeat him.”

Biden is already the country’s oldest president and had insisted repeatedly that he was up for the challenge of another campaign and another term, telling voters all they had to was “watch me.”

And watch him they did. His poor debate performance prompted a cascade of anxiety from Democrats and donors who said publicly what some had said privately for months, that they did not think he was up to the job for four more years.

Concerns over Biden’s age have dogged him since he announced he was running for reelection, though Trump is just three years younger at 78. Most Americans view the president as too old for a second term, according to an August 2023 poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. A majority also doubt his mental capability to be president, though that is also a weakness for Trump.

Biden often remarked that he was not as young as he used to be, doesn’t walk as easily or speak as smoothly, but that he had wisdom and decades of experience, which were worth a whole lot.

“I give you my word as a Biden. I would not be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job,” he told supporters at a rally in North Carolina a day after the debate. “Because, quite frankly, the stakes are too high.”

But voters had other problems with him, too — he has been deeply unpopular as a leader even as his administration steered the nation through recovery from a global pandemic, presided over a booming economy and passed major pieces of bipartisan legislation that will impact the nation for years to come. A majority of Americans disapprove of the way he’s handling his job, and he’s faced persistently low approval ratings on key issues including the economy and immigration.

Biden’s motivation for running was deeply intertwined with Trump. He had retired from public service following eight years serving as vice president under Obama and the death of his son Beau but decided to run after Trump’s comments following a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when white supremacists descended on the city to protest the removal of its Confederate memorials.

Trump said: “You had some very bad people in the group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. On both sides.”

Biden’s wife, first lady Jill Biden, responded to the president’s announcement by reposting Biden’s letter announcing his decision and adding red heart emojis.

Granddaughter Naomi Biden Neal said on social media, “I’m nothing but proud of my Pop.” She said he has served the country “with every bit of his soul and with unmatched distinction” and “our world is better today in so many ways thanks to him.”

Raven took on the job in April 2022 and has served as the Department of the Navy’s chief operating officer and chief management officer, according to his official biography.

He oversaw a variety of programs and was responsible for the department’s business operations, risk management and performance management.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro praised Raven as a “true leader” in a statement announcing the end of his tenure.

Raven was a key cog in the trilateral defense partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States known as AUKUS, Del Toro said, and also oversaw “the largest-ever investment in shipbuilding” as well as Guam infrastructure improvements, among other accomplishments.

“We have benefited from Erik’s wise counsel and loyal service to the Department and to our nation,” Del Toro said. “Our national security, Navy and Marine Corps are stronger because of his service. We wish him the best in his future endeavors.”

Raven’s successor has not been publicly announced, but the position requires Senate confirmation.

And on Thursday, after weeks of preparation, security planning and weather delays, the Pentagon announced that a trident pier had been stabbed into the Gaza beach.

The pier is essentially an erector set-like assembly of metal pieces built at sea and sitting close to the water that can assume a variety of lengths depending on the mission requirements.

Retired logisticians like Robbins are seeing a long-neglected but nonetheless vital military capability getting its time to shine, even as concerns remain about the security of the sailors and soldiers handling the undulating, 1,600-foot pier.

The capability, known as Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, will be used to help bring aid to civilians in Gaza as Israeli operations to destroy Hamas continue in the wake of the Palestinian militant group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and is expected to cost at least $320 million.

Before his retirement as a lieutenant colonel in 2007, Robbins spent the last tour of his career as the JLOTS program manager for U.S. Transportation Command, and oversaw three JLOTS exercises, including one in Guatemala before he got out.

Military Times also spoke with two retired senior Army officers, a retired senior Navy supply officer and an active-duty Army officer, who all spent years of their service focused on JLOTS.

Except for Robbins, the retired and active-duty officers all requested anonymity to speak candidly about the capability and the Gaza mission. Military Times confirmed their identities and their military service.

“So few people know what a JLOTS entails,” one retired Army transportation officer told Military Times. “You can’t go walk the halls of the Pentagon and find two people who know what they’re talking about, because it’s such a small niche capability that’s very, very specialized.”

JLOTS is a feat of military engineering, in which 1,000 soldiers and sailors first build a massive floating platform at sea, where ships carrying screened cargo from Cyprus can be offloaded.

Trucks are then ferried to the trident pier by vessels that are essentially motorized pier sections, and driven from there onto the beach, where U.N. relief workers will oversee distribution.

Ashore, Israeli military engineers guided the pier into place, according to Navy Vice Adm. Bradley Cooper, deputy command of U.S. Central Command, which oversees all U.S. forces in the Middle East.

“IDF engineers prepared the beach at Gaza and secured the temporary pier to the beach,” Cooper told reporters Thursday. “This group of engineers were specially trained for this mission by U.S. Army engineers in the preceding weeks on a beach in Israel.”

And while the trident pier has purportedly been attached to the beach without U.S. service members setting foot in Gaza, retired military logistics officers who spoke with Military Times questioned the use of the “boots on the ground” term by the White House and the Pentagon.

A retired Navy supply captain, the equivalent of a colonel in the other services, called the term “code talk in Washington for no risk to U.S. forces.”

But even if the Gaza mission can be pulled off without a single American service member setting foot on the beach in Gaza, those soldiers and sailors will still be at risk, he said.

“I just want honesty, that’s all,” the officer said. “The military is trained for this, they understand it. But let’s be honest about boots on the ground, and that they will be at risk.”

“It’s an inherently risky endeavor when you’re not in complete control of the land and sea and air around it,” he added.

During the JLOTS exercises he partook in, the Navy officer said there were “hundreds” of U.S. troops on the beach.

“Or they’re in very close proximity to the shore, because that’s where all the stuff operates,” he said.

Cooper said Thursday that 500 tons of aid could be flowing off the pier and into Gaza in the coming days, and he emphasized that U.S. and Israeli forces were in close coordination to keep the U.S. troops taking part in the pier mission and the U.N. aid workers safe during the mission.

“On the force protection side, I’m not going to be able to talk about specifics, other than to say that we’ve been coordinating very closely, as I mentioned, with the Israeli Defense Force to address any potential issue in every domain that exists,” he said.

U.S. and Israeli forces have had “extremely close coordination” in the past six weeks “to work out every single operational detail,” Cooper added.

The officers interviewed by Military Times noted that keeping a trident pier stable and in place involves using heavy anchors buried in the sand, as well as Army tugs that look nothing like a traditional tugboat and are generally used to keep the pier in place as it bobs in the water.

Such an arrangement inevitably requires U.S. troops to be close to shore, if not technically standing on the beach.

They also noted how doing a JLOTS evolution is inherently risky for troops involved, even under the best conditions.

“You’re moving 40-ton and 20-ton containers on an environment that is moving, so anything can happen,” the retired Navy captain said. “Somebody gets crushed, falls overboard or gets run over.”

Despite the security risks and challenges, several of the officers said they think JLOTS is tailor-made for the Gaza mission, delivering much-needed relief via the sea where no port is available.

How they stab the beach

To stab the trident pier into the beach, a platoon’s worth of soldiers first use military bulldozers to dig a massive slot trench on the beach, which leads the pier into a so-called “duck pond,” basically a water-filled entry point for the pier to mate with the beach, the officers said.

After the duck pond is established, which usually takes a day or so, the pier is rammed at four or 5 knots into the sand, and must get at least 40 feet in, according to one retired Army officer who spent decades in the transportation corps.

After that, a mix of buried anchors and Army tug vessels keep the pier in place as trucks start rolling on and off.

“Those anchoring systems need to be constantly maintained, to hold the pier in place, securely and stable so that they can do discharge operations safely,” Robbins said.

It remains unclear whether U.S. or Israeli forces will be in charge of keeping the pier stable.

Security concerns

The retired Army transportation corps officer said JLOTS is “built for a less-kinetic environment,” and using it in Gaza could come with risks, and additional challenges.

Typically, a JLOTS deployment would follow a Marine Corps amphibious assault on a given location, he said, referring to JLOTS as “LOTS” for short.

“Forced entry, they secure the ground and they move inland and create standoff,” he said. “After the Marine Corps provides the ground or the space, the Army then moves in for a long, enduring operations, where we bring in LOTS capability.”

“It’s usually not the kinetic environment we see now in Gaza,” the officer added.

Already, aid groups ashore were mortared last month, and Hamas has said the group will resist any foreign presence associated with the project, The Associated Press reported.

Several of the officers interviewed worried about the Israeli and U.S. militaries’ ability to counter lower-tech threats, such as mortar rounds.

There’s also the matter of keeping the pier safe.

The military has limited JLOTS sets, the Navy officer noted, and one being used in Gaza can’t be used for something else.

The capability has been neglected and underfunded over the years, particularly Army watercraft, the officers said, but a conventional war with China has resurrected a desire for such capabilities, he said.

“There’s plenty in the military that are clamoring for more JLOTS-type enablers,” he said. “This is a great opportunity for the U.S. military to show why the investments in technology like this matter.”

How to do JLOTS

The JLOTS system involves several parts: a massive discharge platform, where cargo ships can offload aid, the trident pier, or causeway, and a series of pier sections-slash-boats that will move the aid from the platform to the pier.

All the parts are built from the same sectional modular pieces, which are put together like an at-sea erector set, the retired Army transportation officer said.

“We just build an acre of causeways all connected together” for the discharge platform, he said. “And then you build the causeway ferries, which are built from causeway sections, causeway pieces … with a powered section at the end. Kind of looks like a pier, but it’s powered and you can use it like a boat and you can build them, 300, 400, 800-feet long.”

“They almost look like a piece of causeway section with a pilot house on it,” the Navy officer said.

Those ferries can then “marry up” at the trident pier, allowing trucks to drive off and toward land.

“It’s all made from the same parts and pieces, it’s just how you erect it,” the Army transportation officer said.

Trident piers sit just a few feet above the water, and are susceptible to volatile and choppy sea states, the transportation officer said.

Other officers recalled how trident pier missions had to be scrapped because of uncooperative waters in past JLOTS exercises.

The Pentagon said earlier this month that the pier was delayed due to weather, and the retired Army officer said that opposing winds and currents can whip up that stretch of the Mediterranean Sea, but that bad weather passes relatively quickly.

Cooper, the deputy CENTCOM commander, said Thursday that how weather affects using the pier will be “situationally dependent.”

“One variable we cannot control here is the weather,” he said. “So we’ll just see what that looks like. It’s very favorable here in the coming days and week or so. And our goal is to move as much humanitarian assistance as possible during that period, and then we’ll make assessments going forward, as we would with any military operation and the weather.’

The Pentagon has indicated that contractors will drive the aid trucks down the trident pier and onto the beach. Officers who spoke with Military Times questioned whether a non-military truck driver would be up to the daunting task.

“Some of that’s a little dicey for a commercial truck driver that probably has never driven on a causeway section before,” one officer said.

‘It’s very risky even to put the damn causeway together’

But even without the security threats that a mission like the one in Gaza poses, JLOTS is a potentially dangerous undertaking for troops involved, even under the best of circumstances, the officers said.

“It’s very risky even to put the damn causeway together,” the active-duty Army officer said.

The massive ships at sea crane-load and dangle massive platform and pier sections over the side, and everything is assembled via human labor.

“We’re talking about building and erecting an erector set of equipment in the water,” the retired Army transportation officer said. “There’s just a huge risk in doing that, and the processes have to be done in ideal conditions.”

Rolling out JLOTS requires “relatively good weather, good sea conditions, to be able to put and stitch all of that stuff together,” one officer said.

The sections used to assemble the discharge platform, the ribbon bridge ferries and the trident pier are all massive and heavy, and soldiers have been crushed carrying out the mission in the past, the officers said.

Once everything is in place, moving the cargo can be equally harrowing, the officers said. Cargo trucks have to drive down a 50-degree sloped ramp from the cargo ship to the floating discharge platform, and those soldiers may not be trained in JLOTS.

“It’s usually the soldier driving his own tank, or his own truck, who’s not a watercraft soldier, he’s not a causeway soldier, this is not his environment, and you’re directing him to get him to shore so he can get back into his environment,” the officer said. “Those soldiers who are unpracticed or inexperienced at that tend to be just frightened to death, operating in the water like that.”

Going down that sloped ramp requires particular leaps of faith for the drivers, even with soldiers on the ground guiding them, and it all gets “exponentially worse at night,” the retired senior Army officer said.

Drivers generally take a right turn to get off the cargo ship and onto the ramp, with little visibility regarding where they’re going.

“They see nothing except water, they cannot see the discharge platform and they have to trust in their skill, and they go off this thing and then down and make a left-hand turn onto the discharge facility,” he said. “That in and of itself is a scary thing — where’s the edge?”

Once onto the ribbon bridge ferry or trident pier, the path back to land is undulating in three dimensions.

“It’s up, it’s down, it’s sideways,” the officer said. “It’s a really dynamic operational environment.”

The pier itself is about 24-feet-wide and “way smaller when you’re driving on it,” the senior officer said.

One section goes one way, while the one ahead goes the other way.

“They’re all connected but they move to some degree independently,” he said. “Everything’s moving, nothing is stable, and until you get used to that and trust your own ability to just go straight and not worry about it, that’s an interesting experience.”

Military Times Editorial Fellow Riley Ceder contributed to this report.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Keith Robbins’ JLOTS-related position. He was JLOTS program manager for U.S. Transportation Command.

The Iranian attack on Saturday, less than two weeks after a suspected Israeli strike in Syria that killed two Iranian generals in an Iranian consular building, marked the first time Iran has launched a direct military assault on Israel, despite decades of enmity dating back to the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

An Israeli military spokesman said that 99% of the drones and missiles launched by Iran were intercepted.

Part of that success rate had to do with the U.S. forces who aided the Israelis in taking out the airborne threats.

From the Mediterranean Sea, the Navy destroyers Carney and Arleigh Burke shot down multiple ballistic missiles in the attack, according to a defense official and media reports.

Carney has become a workhorse of the Navy in recent months and has been crucial to shooting down missile and drone attacks over the Red Sea sent by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen since October.

The ship left the Middle Eastern waters of U.S. Central Command earlier this month and entered the Mediterranean. Officials at the time declined to say why it was on the move.

Meanwhile, White House officials confirmed that the Air Force’s 494th and 355th fighter squadrons also played a role in Israel’s defense, racking up dozens of aerial takedowns.

President Joe Biden reached out to the squadrons to personally express his thanks for “their extraordinary airmanship and skill that was displayed throughout this multi-hour engagement.”

A Patriot missile defense battery based in Irbil, Iraq, also shot down Iranian weapons, officials told journalists.

This weekend’s attack came not only from Iranian territory, but also from proxies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, officials said.

What comes next remains unclear.

Iran had about 150 ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel from Iranian territory, and appears to have used up most of that current stockpile in its weekend attack, retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, the former head of U.S. Central Command, said Monday.

McKenzie discussed the attack in a panel discussion with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a Washington-based think tank and lobbying group.

McKenzie argued that Iran’s expenditure of those 150 long-range missiles, out of a total ballistic missile stockpile of about 3,000, showed that Iran’s barrage on Israel “was a maximum effort. It was an indiscriminate effort.”

The U.S. and its partners in the region are easily able to track when Iran brings its ballistic missiles out of storage and positions them on launch pads, he said.

When Iran launches, deep space sensors detect that immediately, he said. Radars in the region then catch when any missiles break the radar plane, he said.

Especially given the distance involved, “it is hard for Iran to generate a bolt from the blue against Israel,” McKenzie said.

World leaders are urging Israel not to retaliate after Iran launched an attack involving hundreds of drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron told the BBC on Monday the U.K. does not support a retaliatory strike, while French President Emmanuel Macron said Paris will try to “convince Israel that we must not respond by escalating.”

“This is not a contractor-owned, contractor-operated capability, but this is a uniformed capability that we’ll be able to own [and] operate unmanned capabilities that can be employed within particular spaces,” Adm. Samuel Paparo said.

The Navy created its first unit dedicated to surface drones, Unmanned Surface Vessel Division 1, in 2022.

Paparo also said the Navy will launch Integrated Battle Problem 24.1 in March, which will pair manned and unmanned capabilities.

He mentioned that prior exercises involved drones traveling 50,000 miles over seven months, as well as experiments involving the placement of SM-6 missile launchers on large surface drones.

Paparo also called the Navy’s unmanned work in various fleet commands “complementary battle labs” that are all pushing toward the same goal of honing unmanned and autonomous operations.

A primary goal of the work is to not unnecessarily risk sailor lives, he said.

“Don’t send a human being to do something dangerous that a machine can do better, faster and more cheaply,” Paparo said. “Ensure that you have the means of control.”

He noted much of this work is done quietly “for the simple reason that we don’t want to expose it to an adversary that would emplace a counter to that capability.”

“A key principle within warfare is the element of operational security,” Paparo said. “So for most exquisite capabilities, if I’m doing my job, you won’t be knowing about it.”

He began his keynote speech with a grim warning about the state of the globe. “The world is increasingly descending into chaos and disorder, and from Europe to the Middle East to the Pacific, we’re seeing significant shifts in state behaviors, and they are not random,” he said.

“At a recent state visit to Moscow, the [People’s Republic of China] president, I won’t utter his name, was overheard telling the Russian president that right now, there are changes the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years, and we are the ones driving those changes together,” Paparo said. “The changes referenced are challenges to our security, our freedom and our well-being.”