US 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.
I think ships make a lot of sense - particularly much cheaper ships built in larger quantities. Think WWII era destroyers and frigates that can be mass-deployed by the dozens for air and sea coverage. Obviously updated quite a lot with cheap point defense, and of course some more expensive ballistic missile defense systems. The fact we can't send 100+ warships out there to create an integrated air and sea defensive screen for not even drone swarms - just a few dozen drones at at time at best - is pretty embarrassing.
The question is if the US is even capable of building such a thing these days? My bets are on no, since we can't seem to build much of anything at an industrial scale for any cost. But that can turn relatively quickly so long as there is emergency of existential scale and time enough to do it.
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.