Here are the top issues facing the US surface fleet in 2018

It's a goat rope, that's for sure. Shooting for super high tech as in the Elmo's with such high cost that we get only 3, rather than designing new functional hulls with large electric plants, azipod drives and abundant power for mission systems. We really don't need radical hulls, we need functional ones.

I forgot where I saw it, but there was a stat saying the Navy was tasked with the same number of missions as they had when there were 2x as many ships. Combine that with reduced manning on each ship, and you have problems that everyone on the deck plates knows.... Either cut missions, or increase manning, or as LCDR (Join to see) said invest in offboard sensors...

They need to stop imagining a huge fleet they'll never have and realize they've vastly over stretched what they do have. Half the op-tempo, better maintenance, and a transition to offboard sensors are what the surface Navy needs. You can't do any of those things unless you drastically reduce their tasking.