Can someone articulate what the role of the CNO is? A lack of any comments on two carriers double pumping in this environment smacks of leading from behind.
Literally CNO's job is to
man, train, and equip- and that's the law too. If there's a problem that he can't solve then that next person up is the service secretary. It's the secretary's job to roger up when a problem isn't going to get solved, and to either provide/reallocate time and resources to solve it or acknowledge that it won't get solved. At the same time, the CNO works with the Joint Chiefs to figure out what operating forces they can or can't provide to the COCOMs (i.e. CENTCOM, PACOM, etc...) and all of those guys work for the Secretary of Defense (who works for the President...) and all of them tell Congress how much everything is going to cost.
That's breaking it down Barney-Style, it's kinda abstract, but that's it in a nutshell.
I think what you're really asking is who talks to who and what do they say when someone says they want another aircraft carrier deployed next year, but the answer is yes you can have an aircraft carrier but no, it's not going to be able to do everything it's supposed to do because lots of stuff is still broken or worn out.
The system actually works pretty well if everybody is forthright. Bad news never gets better with time, it only gets worse.
There are some clichés about paper tigers (hollow force is another term that comes up a lot in every postwar drawdown). Paper tigers make for pretty lousy foreign policy, but a really great military costs too much for any country to maintain indefinitely. There's a wide gray area in between where you can maintain a good enough military for a long time, at much less expense, and spend money to make it a lot better if and when the time comes. The trick is to not let it wither away too badly but keep it in that gray area. People have studied this problem and debated it for thousands of years. When you figure out the answer, please let the rest of us in on it.