>The Navy can only afford to spend what it has been allowed to spend.

I argue it's clearly mismanagement by navel leaders who love toys and see people as cheap. The US Navy gets a very predictable and consistent budget, these days around 200 billion a year plus 50 billion for the marines. They take that budget and put it into various pools, two of which are new ships and labor costs. If they don't have the money to pay a wage that would attract enough sailors to fully staff the fleet, it means they got the ratio wrong and have been overspending on ship at the cost of adequate labor.