The problem is the mission: if you want the Navy to be present all around the world all the time, able to handle serious battle, it really doesn't have enough ships. If you don't agree with that mission, then you need to elect Congresspeople who agree with you.
The new mission is more reminiscent of the traditional Navy mission; inspecting vessels, supporting anti-insurgency efforts, and performing patrols. These are all missions of a littoral navy with smaller vessels.
Sometimes I wonder if it'd make sense to try to build a capital ship where the giant "carrier" launches not only planes, but also small littoral boats. Steaming a littoral combat ship across oceans can't be that fuel-efficient, and also makes the boat require more size to maintain a sufficient crew for so long; maybe it'd be better to have smaller, shorter-range patrol boats that are kept inside the carrier until it gets to a place where it wants to launch them. Of course, you'd need a really huge carrier for this, but you'd get efficiencies of scale here, by being able to power the whole thing with nuclear reactors, and only burn fossil fuels for the shorter ranges the patrol boats operate at. The drones, combined with the carrier-launched patrol boats, would be able to handle all those operations within a pretty large radius of wherever the mega-carrier drops anchor, with the drones doing surveillance and strikes if necessary, and the patrol boats motoring in where needed, as directed by the drone surveillance.
Right now Navy's have two roles, protect shipping and launch aircraft / missiles. When an aircraft carrier can project force out thousands of km you really don't need a lot of them.
Honestly, I suspect the Navy would be better off with a fleet of solar powered drones and buoy for very high resolution surveillance to back up strikes vs. high cost patrol boats.
Probably WWII. But that's not a good metric: the purpose of the modern American Navy is to project force, and also to act as a deterrent. When the US can sit a carrier battle group a few dozen miles off the shore of your country, carrying a rather enormous amount of firepower and the ability to deliver it anywhere within 1000km of that, not many are going to want to challenge that.
>When an aircraft carrier can project force out thousands of km you really don't need a lot of them.
F/A-18s can't fly that far. I just looked up the Super Hornet on Wikipedia and it says the combat radius is just over 700km. (The straight-line range is 2346km, but that's not helpful if you want to get back to the ship and doesn't include actual combat maneuvers and a decent reserve.)
So if you want to be able to project force in multiple areas of the world, you'll need that many carrier groups. It's not like a carrier in the Persian Gulf can fly some planes over to India if they need to. Also, Navy ships (just like military aircraft) need a LOT of maintenance, so there's always a bunch of ships in port.
We don't have the technology to have solar-powered drones that can carry ordnance.
The Super Hornet is designed for air to air combat and needs to stick around in combat for a while which makes the range rather deceptive. Further as all modern combat jets they can do mid air refueling so it's more a question of how much the Navy wants to spend and how long and how much fuel they are willing to spend on transit.
The range for just going somewhere and dropping at lot of bombs without refueling is another consideration. With and without external fuel tanks yet another.
Honestly, the Navy is not going to say what they consider maximum range for strategic reasons.