Originally Posted by
rickair7777
That's up to the politicians, via budgets.
While it might appear on occasion the the USN wants to reduce the fleet size I can 100% guarantee that's because they aren't funded to maintain it adequately, and are trying to balance resources... rbest combination of numbers and types of ships, while still being able to maintain and man them with allocated funding.
AF does the same with planes. Army somewhat less so because their hardware is less complex and costly, they are more manpower intensive.
Unfortunately, political budget decisions drive the readiness bus in a way that service level decision makers could only hope to. Our Congress and President both decide the top level numbers and frequently micromanage the programmatic decisions. The services then get to make the best of the results in a way that advances leadership’s priorities. Congress and the President sometimes impose stupid stuff and sometimes force good stuff on the services. Just like our military service chiefs they are far from perfect. The biggest challenge throughout my career was a mismatch between missions assigned and assets allocated. Decades of doing more with less has broken many mission areas. Political impositions in how we recruit and train are merely making it worse (in my opinion). As always, things will continue to get worse until a serious conflict imposes the discipline of dead bodies to the process.