There was a distinct sense of optimism in January when the Navy's surface warfare community gathered for its annual conference outside Washington.
President Donald Trump's campaign promises to build more ships buoyed the spirits of many Navy professionals at the Surface Navy Association's symposium.
There's a widespread belief that somehow Trump and the Republicans on Capitol Hill will be able to eliminate the defense spending caps known as sequestration, allowing the trajectory of all military budgets to shift sharply upward.
But even if the Navy gets more money, it will not be unlimited. Navy budgets will still need to make tradeoffs. And careful listening to the Navy's top brass at the surface warfare conference suggests that a ship-building spree is not necessarily what today's Navy needs most.
"When the [Trump] transition team asked me what I would do with more money today, this year and next, my answer was not more ships," Adm. Bill Moran, vice chief of naval operations, told a room full of Navy officers and industry representatives at the conference.
"It was making sure that the 274 ships we had were maintained and modernized to provide 274 ships worth of combat power."
Let's hope the new administration is listening to Moran. The call for "more maintenance" might not be what civilian leaders want to hear. It's not sexy. It doesn't make for good sound bites. It's not the stuff of great legacies. It's much more fun to unveil new ship designs and long-term plans for how to reach a 350-ship Navy and the many new strategic options those exciting additions would bring to America's Navy.
But deferred maintenance is a problem. It's getting worse with time. It's impacting the fleet's readiness and sailors' quality of life.
It would be an overstatement to say the fleet is "broken." But wear and tear in the surface fleet tops the list of today's problems in the eyes of many Navy leaders.
The readiness impact should be obvious to the new administration. Trump once famously said his plan for defeating ISIS was to "bomb the shit out of them."
But when he took office on Jan. 20, there was no aircraft carrier and air wing in the U.S. Central Command region because the maintenance overhaul on the carrier George H.W. Bush was running late.
The good news is the problem could be solved within a few years if the money was spent properly.
The new Trump administration and GOP-controlled Congress, when they get down to the brass tacks of governing, should make sure any increase in spending for the Navy includes some more money for maintenance.
