"One of the lessons from the past is not to build small ships -"
I'd add building ships that don't breakdown regularly is also a good idea. But if we keep building larger and larger ships we have, given the budgets available, less and less of them.
Patrick Boniface of Warship World recently pointed out that:-
"Modern warships are more capable and their weapons more lethal, but they can only be in one place at a time and fewer and fewer available hulls they are in less places more often that before"