If you expect a ground war, building ships would be kinda stupid.

...with 2/3 of the Earth's surface being under water, expecting *only* a
"ground war' is a good way to get into trouble for most countries...

Well it seems that USA with it's navy is quite capable of getting into
trouble . Quite frankly i don't see a point of maintaining a strong navy
if you are preparing to fight off horde of tanks. How large navy should
Austria have? Or Swiss? Or from those countries that have shoreline Finland
or Sweden? Those large ships would just have been targets in the Baltic.
The point is that USA needs to have a navy to be able to project force, but
the Europeans were preparing for a war in Europe so they didn't need that
strong navy.