Dreazen WSJ story.
Gates was fairly explicit in a recent speech about the Navy's continuing penchant for multibillion-dollar platforms being the real cause of its declining numbers, making clear (as Dreazen writes) that "he thought the Navy was buying too many big-ticket items, such as aircraft carriers, while failing to devote enough resources to unmanned submarines and other relatively inexpensive systems."
The Leviathan prefers the few and the expensive, but the SysAdmin demands the many and the cheap.
The numbers stagger: $3-6B for a destroyer, $7B for a top-line sub, and $11B for a carrier.
Gates:
You don't necessarily need a billion-dollar guided missile destroyer to chase down and deal with a bunch of teenage pirates wielding AK-47s.
Naturally, Gates is accused by industry cheerleaders as "utterly misreading the strategic landscape."
My argument remains the same: Buy fewer of the biggest platforms but keep the technology advanced and intimidating, accepting that the per-unit cost will suck. But you will inevitably shift toward the many and cheap and the unmanned if you want to keep playing worldwide. Violence has migrated downward from the system to states and now primarily to individuals. So yes, keep a decent hedge against any possible resumption of system-level warfare, but do not pretend that's enough to manage the system.
Nobody forces the Navy to shrink its numbers except the Navy itself.