About 90 percent of what deploys and sustains US forces goes by sea. Every campaign since 1861 has turned on a port or a sea lane. This page shows the IC fleet on six missions and the ports it protects, in peace and in war.
Pick a mission. The fleet sails to researched stations at the choke points, patrol areas and escort slots the mission needs, and reports through the links it would really use. Attack submarines are drawn as patrol boxes. Ballistic-missile submarines are never drawn at all.
Before the 2026 crisis about 20 million barrels of oil a day, one fifth of world use, passed a strait 21 nautical miles wide. The escort group gathers tankers off Fujairah and takes them through the traffic lanes into the Gulf, with the carrier in open water outside. Warships follow in the lead tanker's wake, the lesson of the 1987 convoys.
Every report that reaches the fleet command centers reaches the fleet picture in The Brain. Ships report in seconds. Submarines report when they choose to.
A surface group shares one picture over line-of-sight links and reports to shore through protected satellites in a quarter of a second per hop. Submerged submarines can only receive: a very-low-frequency broadcast reaches a few tens of meters into seawater, one way. They answer at scheduled check-ins, mast up, and then go dark.
Protected and wideband military satellites carry the traffic to shore; commercial constellations carry volume as backup. Within about 300 nautical miles, ships exchange radar tracks directly on line-of-sight data links, so the group fights from one picture. High frequency is the fallback when satellites are denied.
Shore transmitters of about a megawatt broadcast on very low frequency to the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. A boat copies it deep on a trailing wire. To reply it must come shallow and raise a mast, so it reports rarely and briefly. Ballistic-missile submarines receive continuously and almost never transmit.
Surface vessels use the same satellites and a line-of-sight mesh with the group. Undersea vehicles talk by acoustic modem over a few kilometers at kilobits per second, through a gateway buoy, and run their plan alone between contacts. Out of contact, the machine keeps its last orders.
The map shows the major US and allied container and military ports, with the strategic seaports the Pentagon can call on 48 hours' notice. Sixty percent of them are shown as IC-operated: autonomous, US-built cranes, hardened, remote-operable. Switch to War to watch what labor, cyber, mines, strikes and surge do to each kind of port. Compare puts the numbers side by side.
Each threat keeps a fraction of peacetime throughput. The fractions multiply. Values are week 2 of a major war, derived from the cases on this page.
The ports shown, in containers a day. Peace is the 2024 rate. War is week 2, approaches not mined except where the map marks mines.
Containers a day = annual TEU ÷ 365 ÷ 1.6 TEU per move. IC ports run 24 hours at 40 moves an hour per crane against 16 hours at 30 today.
Moves a day = cranes × availability × hours × moves an hour × channel × power × systems × labor. Conventional 10 × 0.90 × 16 × 30. IC 10 × 0.95 × 21 × 40. An IC port in week 2 of a war out-handles a conventional port in peace.
Each line is a matter of record. Sources are kept with the build notes.
About 90 percent of the equipment that deploys and sustains US forces travels by sea. In 1991 ships carried about 95 percent of all cargo, fuel included.
Once the port was in Allied hands, Germany fired more than 1,600 V-2 rockets at it in a 175-day bombardment.
Mines held a US amphibious force off the port for about six days and sank three US minesweepers.
Air-dropped mines closed North Vietnam's main port in one day. 27 merchant ships stayed trapped for the rest of the year.
Attacks on merchant ships cut Red Sea shipping by 50–55 percent and container tonnage through Suez by more than 80 percent.
In the Second World War US submarines sank about 4.8 million tons of Japanese merchant shipping, more than half of all Japanese merchant tonnage lost.
A 1944 division needed 600–700 tons of supplies a day. Antwerp was captured almost intact in September 1944 and could not be used until 28 November, after a five-week battle for its approaches that cost 12,873 casualties.
The Pentagon designates 18 commercial ports, alongside its own military terminals, as strategic seaports. Each must hand over berths, staging yards and rail on 48 hours' notice.
Nearly 80 percent of the ship-to-shore cranes at US ports were built by one Chinese state-owned manufacturer. A 2024 congressional investigation found cellular modems on some of them that the ports never asked for.
The reserve ships held to carry an Army overseas average more than 45 years old. In a 2019 no-notice test the surge fleet's cumulative success rate was 40.7 percent.