Why NATO assumptions did not rescue Cold War warship design

Did Cold War warship design make sense if ships were expected always to operate with NATO support?

No; post-Falklands revisions showed that assumptions built on other assumptions had moved too far from operational reality.

The designs did not make sense merely because planners expected to operate inside a NATO force structure. Alliance support could not remove every requirement for a ship to survive or act under less favorable conditions. The breadth of revisions made across NATO navies after the Falklands War shows that the problem was not confined to one British class or one colonial commitment. Successive assumptions about mutual support had become stacked on one another until the resulting designs drifted away from operational reality.