The Navy can't just think of logistics as moving the tonnage to established hubs in northeast Asia.
The Pacific is huge, but the Navy had the luxury during the post-Cold War world of shrinking that world to Japan and South Korea. No more:
A future contested battlefield and the need for resilience could mean a change from “hub and spoke” delivery of supplies – in which logistics forces build a so-called iron mountain at a forward port and from there move troops and materiel into a theater. That would require a distributed command and control approach to theater logistics to increase survivability of forces, he said.
That is a much more difficult mission. Of course, in INDOPACOM a lot of the distributed assets will be small for a kill web and also in need of frequent relocation to avoid enemy action.
Spreading out the logistics assets to support moving assets across a wide theater will require Navy protection under more demanding conditions. Protection the Navy isn't eager to provide given its other duties.
Spreading out the logistics ships requires a means of protecting them that doesn't spread the fleet out too much to fight for control of the seas. But I don't believe we can count on the Chinese not finding those logistics assets.
We won't assume that America itself is a sanctuary--as the Colonial Pipeline hack demonstrated. But will we assume the oceans between America and our forward units in combat will be sanctuaries?
