The US Navy's real fight isn't against any adversary, it's against its own shipyards. You can have the most advanced destroyers in the world, but if they're waiting years for overhaul and the commercial base can't build fast enough, that fleet is just expensive steel. Everyone focuses on the number of hulls, but presence is about where ships are and how long they can stay there, not just what they carry. Until the maintenance backlog is fixed and we rebuild domestic shipbuilding capacity, every other hardware debate is a distraction.