The size and shape of the Navy directly reflects the prevailing foriegn policy atmosphere of a decade previous.
The Navy is this country’s number one flexible policy instrument. Whenever it hits the fan, the President wants to know “Where’s the nearest carrier?”, whenever we wish to cow some upstart, we send a Fleet Amphib group, or a carrier group. When we’re really pissed, we send both. The Policy Wonks decide who we’re going to need to over-awe, and they tell Congress, who decides if that vision meets the current national mood (isolationism, interventionsim, or somewhere in-between, does-my-district-need-more-jobs, etc.), and approves a building schedule (greatly over-simplified, but close enough, while keeping this reasonably short).
It takes about 10 years or so for major capital ships to go from drafting table to combat-ready, so we’re always a little behind current policy. Funny thing is, to some degree, current capability affects current policy, so the ends tend towards the middle. Meanwhile, fads come and go, both political and Naval, and policies (military, political, and financial) change as the national mood and current world situation changes, so you can see the difficulty in designing the “perfect” global fleet. Given that difficulty, the trend towards highly capable, extremely flexible, and very expensive capital ships is quite understandable. If we don’t know what we need from moment-to-moment, we’ll just build ships that can do it all.
The gaps are filled by less capable, and therefore less “sexy” vessels, even though many of those are quite capable in their own right, such as cruisers, destroyers, and tenders. Auxilliary vessels, and other small types, such as minesweepers, live in the shadow of the big boys, and are forgotten by everyone except the Navy itself. We didn’t need Dutch minesweepers to get where we were going, we have plenty of our own. We needed Dutch minesweepers to get where we were going, in a hurry. The cost of maintaining a large fleet of force-multiplier and auxilliary ships, which have a narrow utility, is something we can’t bank-roll right now, as they have relatively little use outside of a shooting war or other conflict, which is what we’re trying to prevent by showing up with the big boys anyway. So, we build smaller numbers of those vessels, and move them about when needed in a trans-oceanic shell-game. When we’re caught by events, and the auxilliaries are out of position, we call on our allies. Being allies, they respond, and so our first warships responding to Desert Shield were protected the excellent Dutch mine-sweeps, instead of our own.