Why the strike-cruiser case collapsed after the Cold War

The Nunn-McCurdy amendment created trouble for the Navy's costly cruiser plans. The Soviet peer threat had supplied a geostrategic rationale for both the strike-cruiser program and the Ticonderogas, but that rationale weakened after 1990-1991. Expensive programs then became much harder to defend. The Ticonderoga could be imagined as a smaller scout cruiser only in relation to the much larger strike cruiser that never entered service. Because the Navy was already building a ship officially called a cruiser, the label also complicated attempts to justify a separate, costlier cruiser program. The episode shows how threat assumptions, budgets, oversight, and classification can interact in procurement decisions.