That’s why we built the Alaskas. Other nations scraped together resources to build what they desperately needed. We built stuff just because we could. Like B-29s that carried atomic weapons.
But that was when we had industry...
The Alaskas: the last gasp of the battle cruiser (in fact, if not in name).
We didn’t build the Alaska class cruisers just for the hell of it. They were authorized in 1940 because Naval intelligence believed that the Japanese were building a class of very large cruisers. Faster than our battleships at the time, with larger guns than our heavy cruisers.