In relative terms? The cold war US navy was facing very serious threats from recent Soviet naval developments sometime in the 80s. The USN was the strongest then, yes, but not invincible.
I would still say the USN towards the end of WW2. Halsey’s 3rd fleet was stronger than most navies of entire countries.
The limiting factor on the Tomahawk has always been the cost though, not the number of available launch platforms. VLS cells have always been able to carry Tomahawks in place of Standard SAMs as needed. If the target was worth expending a million dollars to deliver a 1,000lb warhead has been the limiting factor on its combat use, not the number of launch platforms. It certainly hasn’t doubled the ability of carriers to project power onto land.
Networked platforms. Maybe stealth technology (improved quieting/lower RCS topsides)? Maybe widespread deployment of SM-3 Standard SAM too? Improved low frequency sonar, both passive and active. But allowing all of your platforms to talk to each other, without the other guy listening in, and thereby knowing where all of your people are, is really powerful.
I don’t think the CNO was being hyperbolic at all.
Edit: Also add UAVs.
Maybe, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Bring back the Q-ships!
They’d be more or less useless. 
The dock workers at various ports key the pirates into what ships are good targets.
I’m pretty sure that’s a reference to Skorzeny’s rescue of Mussolinifrom an Alpine resort in September 1943.
The US Navy was most powerful at the end of 1990.
It had 11 SSBNs carrying 1,760 W68 (40kt) warheads, 20 SSBNs carrying 3,072 W76 (100kt) warheads and 2 SSBNs carrying 384 W88 (475kt) warheads.
That is 5,216 warheads with a total yield of 612 megatons.
It is hard to comprehend the destruction these warheads would cause if they were unleashed.
“Where Eagles Dare” for real.
That’s the argument, though. Why count those megatons if they’ll never be used?
I don’t think they’ll be used even tactically (against targets at sea). There would be too much political fall out. (heh heh. Fall out. I made a funny.)
They were built to provide deterrence and did the job well. But they still had the potential to be used and would be used if nuclear war broke out.
The Admiral made his comments in 2005. I don’t think Nuclear War is/was about to break out. The Pentagon, right now, realises that the foreseeable future conflicts are these anti-terror/pirate small scale conventional stuff. (We don’t need UAV’s to find Beijing with an ICBM.)
Seem’s to me that the Admiral was trying to counter some criticism about the Navy (maybe someone asked if all the money we spend on the Navy was worth it) budget. But counting the Nukes seems to be a bit of misdirection on his part (if my assumption about the criticism is correct), especially as we’ll never use nukes in Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, or Somalia.
I guess one question that hasn’t been addressed is how you assess the Navy vs the rest of the armed forces. I mean, amphibious assault craft are great, but useless without infantry to assault with.
I think a strong argument can be made that the US in post WWII was, for its time, the most powerful force for ship to ship combat. But that was also the end of the ship to ship era, as carriers put aircraft into the role of ship killers.
As far as ability to command the seas, and put attack power onto land, modern capabilities using Tomahawks and carrier based fighters are pretty extreme.
Pirates do pose an interesting challenge. Theoretically, we could saturate their area of operations, man freighters with defense forces, etc, and make the cost of being a pirate substantially more of a deterrent, but the real solution is a political solution affecting the region until piracy is not economically viable for them.
Pakistan could have, if they’d only known the guy was just down the road 
China hasn’t, and because of their huge population they will be able to afford a more powerful navy than the US as their economy matures.
They might build the ships, but that’s a long way from building a navy to rival the USN.
As Admiral Cunninghamsaid before sending his destroyers in to take the battered army off Crete:
I’ll be generous and say the Chinese might manage it in one century.
In 1853, Commodore Perry contacted Japan and famously, “opened them to the West.” IIRC, Japan at that point did not have a bluewater navy. 52 years later in 1905, from a much more restricted level of development than the Chinese have now, Japan had a sufficient navy to completely annihilate an Imperial Russian battle fleet. And win the Russo-Japanese War.
One thing this era is known for is the increasing pace of technological advancement. I will give the Chinese 20 years, but I don’t think it would take a century, if they put their mind to it. This does assume that their opponents will be stagnant.
True, but the Russian navy could hardly be called the dominant navy of its time.
A better example might be the Imperial German Navy that went from essentially a coastal defence force in 1898 to one that could pose a threat to the RN’s Grand Fleet in 1914. However, even then all the German fleet couldn’t even reach parity with one RN element, and this coincided with the Dreadnought revolution that rendered old battleships nearly obsolete in 1906, so both the German and British navies were building the battle fleets pretty much from scratch in 1906.
That parity was more about production priorities than about the inherent superiority of British naval tradition though.
Their assumption of inherent naval superiority via tradition was one of the reasons they seriously risked being clobbered at Jutland, even with numerical superiority.
Otara
Romney, Obama and the Navy of today: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/08/politics/fact-check-romney-navy/index.html?iid=article_sidebar