alt Hacker NewsUS Naval power has been drastically hollowed out - other than for strategic force projection for low intensity conflicts involving air strikes. Even for that, it's a shadow of what it once was.
This isn't the 1980's where we can surge 100 warships to an area of the world to deny the area or perform escort missions.
If we decided to 10x the Navy budget today and start building ships we'd be a couple decades out since we'd have to start from "train the ship building workforce" first principles to begin with.
Other than air power, the US has been operating off military (reputation) inertia for decades now.
There is also the question of whether ships even make sense right now, when a multi-billion-dollar ship full of sailors is at huge risk from a swarm of drones costing 1/1000th as much, and we have not yet mastered drone defenses.