Those things were built to be cheap and disposable, poor quality steel, bare bones low speed oil fueled steam engines with no emergency back-up and barely enough electrical power to power the lights and radios needed for habitation and navigation. They still took about three months to build.
I spent 20 years in the Navy, worked in Shipyards for around 40 years. My home is on a canyon/hill side that overlooks NASSCO, which builds Navy and large commercial ships.
I can attest, shipbuilding is not like getting a 100k piece metal Lego set and dropping a rebuilt Rolls Royce engine in it, put some launchers and guns on it, then dropping in into the water and throwing the electronics on it.
Even if one can get a common (as in, across all hulls in the class) MilSPEC ship design for a combat ready ship class approved, funded, and completed in one year, it still takes a minimum of two years to build and launch each Navy ship (Commercial ships appear to take one year), and another year to complete all the other installations and testing before the ship is ready to be deployed.
Not to mention that some engineering, combat or communications/navigations systems take almost two years to procure and get ready to install from a manufacturer. You can't just pick up a Supersonic Missile Launcher on Amazon Prime using Next Day Shipping.
Four years at a minimum to build a combat ready ship that could be operational for at least 10 years.
Do you as a taxpayer want foot a 2 Billion dollar bill for a supposedly a highly technical combat ready ship that only will last maybe one underway deployment, because the "Department of Manly Man War" wants to shove a brand new destroyer, battleship, or carrier (aircraft or Marines) into the water every six to eight months?
On edit - and as a poster up thread pointed out - warfare is changing - it's drones. And support ships. Not ships that make a big boom...
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