Turns out, you can google up most anything, including historical lists of US Navy ship numbers, as of today:
For example if, relatively speaking, the world is quiet and peaceful, then maybe a designated US Navy task force doesn't need to show up in a certain area every six months -- maybe once a year, or every other year is plenty often enough.
Bottom line: I agree with your point that the military in general is over-stretched and under-resourced, simply pointing out that under Bush Jr., funding did increase about 50%, including the wars.
I would also not expect any Republican President or Congress to put the needs for phony-baloney "economic stimulus" ahead of those for genuine national defense.
But I'm also saying that quality is more important than quantity.
Whenever we can replace several older design ships with a new one which can do all their jobs, I'd say go for it.
And if that means reducing total numbers, well, so be it.
We've also gone from once having four carrier capable builders too one and that in itself is disturbing. Take a map of Tidewater Opps area {Norfolk} and draw a 10-20 mile radius around N.O.B. Norfolk. This is general knowledge so I'll post it. We have N.O.B. and five carrier piers. {only three carrier piers up till sometime in the eighties with a larger carrier force during that time}. Up river there is Norfolk Naval Shipyards, out on the beach we have Little Creek Amphib Base and Oceana N.A.S. Then across the river from N.O.B. is Newport News Ship building our sole carrier builder left. That can literally mean most east coast assets could be gone in one attack.
Ok here is another issue. We do not have the infrastructure left to build a military hack. The stupid Morons tore down the plants, closed the bases, and sold the land, and shredded the plans like the F-14 project. We are foreign dependent in our national defense. Add to that our presidents both parties who think the U.S. military is a world police service and turning what should be quick in and out operations into a decade or more of a money pit for all their friends.
Don't get me wrong I am not anti-war. Not in the least. My beliefs on how we should fight wars would label me a barbarian in todays PC foreign policy makers and Pentagon. I believe the best defense is a strong standing one you never have to fully use because the enemy understands their destruction will come swiftly and no mercy till unconditional surrender or elimination of the enemy. GITMO would be set up for tribunals and have a firing squad or gallows. The Geneva Treaties should be wipe paper in the Pentagon rest rooms.
This type is about clapped-out. The FF/FFG's are all approaching 30 years' service and many FFG's have been disarmed of their Standard launchers. Most or all of them will be decommissioned in the next three to five years.
The FFG type is not integrated into the Aegis system (on whose electronic shoulders we are resting, and risking, a lot), and although all Navy ships from the 1960's had some level of tactical data integration with the NTDS system, the Aegis standard has meant that the FFG is no longer used to escort carrier battle groups in "hot" zones like the Persian Gulf. The type is mostly used now for pirate and drug-smuggling interdiction and show-the-flag missions steaming independently, and to escort Marine Expeditionary Units embarked in LHA/LHD's.
My young cousin reported that one FFG failed her hull inspection when her hull plating was found in places to have degraded to 1/8" thick, thin enough to be challenged by a moderately skilled karateka's foot. Their main weapons now are the Phalanx CIWS and Stinger MANPADS, and a single gun mount.
These are the last of the single-screw DE/FF "ocean escorts" begun in the 1960's as ASROC/DASH/SQS-23/26 megadome platforms, one of the less-useful types in the Navy's OOB.
.....under Bush Jr., funding did increase about 50%, including the wars.
Post-9/11, yes. But that took 9/11, and it wasn't Bush's idea -- his first impulse, educated and "bred in", in the best Yankee Yalie topsider tradition, was to cut.
On entering office in 2001, Sec. Rumsfeld sent up an appropriation request of $60 billion that he deemed to represent Pres. Bush's 2000 campaign promises of rectifying the budgetary abuses under the Klintonx' maladministration of the 1990's, when DoD was robbed out to fund Sinkboy's "mini-initiative" headline-grabbing pseudoprojects and vote-getting lollipops. National war stocks and training had been dangerously drawn down, and NASA's range and flight safety programs had been cut almost to nothing (resulting in the Columbia disaster in 2003).
But Rumsfeld was turned down and given a "stand-fast" order instead to pass to Pentagon budget-writers. Bush simply reneged, and then forced Rumsfeld to cancel the Army's "Crusader" precision, long-range self-propelled gun program, a replacement for/improvement on the 155mm M-109 design that had been around since the 1950's.
Worse, Pres. Bush also mandated that an SDI appropriation for $60 billion or so be carved out of existing defense appropriation levels instead -- that's a swing down of $120 billion for existing programs and needs. At NASA, Bush ordered another carveout from the already fatally skeletonized shuttle program, to fund an Air Force intelligence program, on the order of 12% of NASA's budget. Worse still, he sent over uber-CPA/pencil-whipper/budget hero Sean O'Keefe from OMB to be the new program director at NASA -- O'Keefe knew nothing about the space agency and said so -- and promulgated the carve-out even after the Columbia loss, announcing it three months after the accident.
This IMHO, all done pre-9/11, represents Bush's actual program (as opposed to the one he ran on) and firmly places him in the "wooden gun" tradition like his daddy and Dick Cheney, cutting or freezing taxes and starving the armed services in order to facilitate tax cuts for the Wall Street Wing of the GOP and their blue-haired client/owners.
I would also not expect any Republican President or Congress to put the needs for phony-baloney "economic stimulus" ahead of those for genuine national defense.
Concurring bump. I would add that, in the absence of any need for "stimulus", DoD, NASA, and several other areas of government will still be cut back by "tax-cut appropriators" in the GOP, to pay for access-capitalism programs favored by the same people, whom we lovingly call RiNO's. They will be supported, on general paleocon principles, by any Paultards floating around the Congress as a ghostly, lingering presence of the old isolationists of the 1930's.
What's ironic is that Paultards have no memory, individual or group, of why they are Paultards, or that their general isolationism and astringent, tax-cutting "principles" once supported a much more pragmatic purpose, as the aegis that once overspread and intellectually protected the Wall Street Wing of the GOP, the economic royalists whose real philosophy would be better described as "givemeallthemoneyism", and whose more vibrant, vigorous modern-day "haustorium" -- parasitic tentacle -- is represented by access capitalism and K Street.
The anticommunist defense Democrats and the dry-eyed, practical, patriotic Capehart-Vandenburg defense Republicans of the 1940's and 1950's are a memory now, and the Congress is the playground of neo-Stalinist "Prog" Democrats and "big-government [pseudo]conservative" RiNO's.