At the end of WWII hundreds of ships were decommissioned as we reduced our manpower from over 12 million.
In 1958, the Bureau of Ships prepared two feasibility studies to see if Alaska and Guam were suitable to be converted to guided missile cruisers. The first study involved removing all of the guns in favor of four different missile systems. At $160 million this was seen as too costly, so a second study was conducted. This study left the forward batteries—the two 12-inch triple turrets and three of the 5-inch dual turrets—in place and added a reduced version of the first plan for the aft. This would have cost $82 million, and was still seen as too costly.[11] As a result, the conversion proposal was abandoned and the ship was instead stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 1 June 1960. On 30 June, she was sold to the Lipsett Division of Luria Brothers to be broken up for scrap.[8]
These were special, as by the time they were completed the Alaska class had no mission.
They were built according to a pre-WWI concept, as “commerce protection” cruisers. The Germans tried to use an already obsolete concept, the “commerce raider” strategy in early WW2, with things like these -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland-class_cruiser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scharnhorst-class_battleship
But they were gone or irrelevant by 1941.