OK, bare with me here as it's been a while since I had SE4 up.
You can do what you asked. Place the escorts on a 'don't get hurt' order and they will fall back with the transports. Your better offf at setting them to a 'long range attack, but don't put any long range weapons on them. You can test out the strategies IIRC in the battle tester program within the ship builder.
You will have to give careful thought to your designs, to get the orders to work right.
Breaking formation is the only way to get ships to operate in a maximized fashion. For best effects keep all ship speeds the same and use small groups as a fleet. You would probably want a carrier group to stay in formation with it's escorts, launch and run to the corner of the map. While your combat fleet breaks and starts pounding the enemy ships with direct fire. Dont forget to set
target priority too! This will have a big effect on how the AI uses your ship.