Army ships aren’t going to be running through highly contested waters
Sailing the friendly seas of WW3. What a concept.
They’ll very likely have some kind of escort anywhere they go that has a chance of enemy contact.
WW2 says that they will have a high probabiity of contact in the Atlantic.
Battle of the Atlantic
Countering the U-Boat Threat and Supplying the Allies
The ultimate cost of victory in this vast area of operations was sobering: Between 1939 and 1945, 3,500 Allied merchant ships (14.5 million gross tons) and 175 Allied warships were sunk, and 72,200 Allied naval and merchant seamen lost their lives.
Who are these cited escorts being provided to the Army? Does somebody have a spare Navy hanging around? The actual Navy will be sort of occupied escorting USNS ships. The Navy has shrunk a lot smaller and will not instantly sprout new warships. The Army would not have a "gigantic problem with (contested) logistics in the Indo-Pacific" if all they had to do was call their servant, the Navy, and the Navy would babysit them wherever they wanted to go.
https://www.msc.usff.navy.mil/Ships/Ship-Inventory/
The Military Sealift Command has a crapload of ships, but those are all Navy.
Neither Russia nor China have any kind of power projection.
Russia sure does have power projection in the Atlantic. Submarines can sail circles around anything on the surface. Cargo ships are slow.
Carriers play no role in cargo ship escort. Carriers do not go anywhere without their own escorts. Carriers are anachronistic against superpowers such as China or Russia. They cannot escape missiles or drone swarms.
Against China or Russia, our carriers will be vulnerable targets of missiles. Our Navy has been unable to stop the Houthis.
A small threat would be submarines,
Small? Easy for the Army to say. They will not be such a threat on land.
As noted in the Defense News articles I linked, the Army recently discovered they have a major problem with contested logistics. It seems they have no escort ships, no surface combat ships. They can move a world of stuff, as long as nobody tries to stop them.
as I’ve mentioned, their stuff isn’t as good as ours, and we know where all of theirs are.
This is the same Army that just discovered they have little ability to carry on contested logistics. Apparently the master planners never considered someone might shoot at them. It has been nearly a century since they had to worry about it. Well, times up.
And how do we know where all of their submarines are without them knowing where all of our submarines are?
The Russian navy spent time developing diesel electric submarines. First scoffed at, they are very difficult to detect. Much of what worked then to detect Russian boats has been negated. A single screw replaced double screws. Cavitation problems have been addressed.
The undersea surveillance HQ used to be COMOCEANSYSLANT in NYC. That was propably covenient for AT&T. The old SOSUS machines are pictured below.
