Carrier spending before postwar budgets contracted

The carrier orders can be read as stretching wartime budgets to buy ships that would never fight Japan. The case for doing so rested on the expectation that public interest and congressional appropriations would fall to their usual postwar lows. A stock of modern ships would allow the Navy to maintain adequate numbers during those lean years. Hearings on postwar military policy in spring 1944 also suggested that the Army Air Forces would compete with naval aviation after the war.