Ironic, isn't it? Bush 41 is the one who started the big downward slide in defense spending, IIRC. For giving national defense the finger, he gets a carrier named after him.
However, he was a good wartime president and did lead the nation trough Desert Storm and the fruit of Reagan's work in the fall of the Soviets (which in part was a result of Reagan building the 600 ship navy).
Well yes, but that was right after the fall of the Soviet Union. The long range plan then called for much lower levels of cuts than Slick 42 eventually put in, and that Bush 43 never reversed by building things back up, aside from a small increase in the Army, balanced by further cuts in the Air Force and Navy.
You are correct.
Bush 41 issued orders to mothball all the BB's and start retiring other ships. He also ordered the heavy corps stationed in Germany demobilized.
Poppy was rudely interrupted in his "peace dividend" tax-cutting/demobilization orgy by Saddam Hussein, who demonstrated precisely why Bush and his successors would need the ships and formations he was demobilizing, but, showing where Dubya got his stubborn streak, Poppy learned nothing from the object lesson, and went right back to mothballing and demobbing as soon as Desert Storm was over.
In addition, during his incumbency, SecDef Dick Cheney ordered the jigs and dies for the F-14 Tomcat cut up, to "prove something" to Grumman during a contract tiff.
In addition, one of the gung-ho soldiers whom Poppy and Big Dick demobbed -- who'd be a sergeant-major or a warrant officer today if he'd stayed in and hadn't been RIF'ed -- was Timothy McVeigh.
It'll be ironic if a Chinese Su-30 gets to the USS Poppy Bush precisely because the Bush won't have the new Tomcats aboard that Poppy and Dick cancelled, along with their AIM-54B/C Phoenix LRAAM's.
That all said, let me note that I hate this business of naming our capital ships after politicians -- especially politicians who haven't shown us the courtesy of dying first.
Names like Princeton and Yorktown and Essex were good enough for the aircraft carriers that brought us victory in World War II. The old tradition ought to continue. If you want to name a ship after a Navy secretary or an admiral, make it a tin can or, better, a DE, and name the destroyers with the traditional names that were used during the Big Show, especially the names of the Pearl Harbor squadrons -- like Dale, Blue, Cassin, Downes, and Helm -- and the destroyers that fought in Ironbottom Sound, Leyte Gulf, and the Coral Sea.
I saw the USS Farenholt being towed out in 1971 to be expended as a target for NAVAIRLANT, which was holding trials for the air-launched Harpoon. She looked beaten-up, but her name was familiar and I wondered why......I was reading Japanese Destroyer Captain at the time, and pretty soon I found a reference to the Farenholt. That little ship had taken a beating from the IJNS Kirishima, a 30,000-ton battlecruiser, in one of the night battles off Guadalcanal, and had survived somehow to bring most of her crew home. Where's her successor and namesake in the Fleet?
I'm sick of naming ships after politicians and admirals who died in their beds. Or, in this case, who haven't even died.