The Russians have also deployed a similar missile on surface ships, and the land based version is in violation of the INF treaty. There is a desire to show that we are willing to respond to an escalation, and to counter it without violating the treaty ourselves.
You mean to say that there is a desire to show that the US is willing to escalate, too.
That said, an existential problem the US Navy is facing (along with all branches of all militaries) is that precision, long-range missile technology is maturing and becoming widely available, making much of the Navy's massive capital investment, it's surface fleet, obsolete. How big a deal is it? Think of it this way (based only on reading foreign policy journals; I'm no expert in any sense):
* Long ago, naval battles were fought by sailors boarding each others' ships and fighting hand-to-hand.
* When cannon were developed and the tech matured, the enemy could sink you long before you got close enough to board them. The superior range of cannons made the boarding actions obsolete. Ships without cannon were merely floating coffins for their personnel. Eventually, cannon (guns) range increased to around a couple of dozen miles in battleships.
* The cannon dominated the seas for generations, but were quickly made obsolete by planes flying off the decks of large ships, with ranges of hundreds of miles. IIRC, at the Battle of Midway in WWII, the first battle to heavily involve aircraft carriers, the Japanese battleships never even saw an American ship much less have a chance to shoot a cannon at one. The battleships were merely floating coffins for their personnel. These days, U.S. aircraft carriers' planes have a range of around 500 miles without refueling.
* Precision missiles do or will have a range of thousands of miles. Those nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the core of U.S. military power projection, naval power and strategy, each carrying maybe $15-20 billion in capital plus ~5,000 lives, will become nothing more than floating coffins. The Chinese military is investing heavily in this prospect; those aircraft carriers have long protected Taiwan, and the Chinese government is investing heavily in missile batteries to make sure the carriers never get within range of a battle in Taiwan. Precision long-range missiles introduce another game-changing problem: they are far cheaper to attack with than to defend against. Right now, there is no effective defense against a large salvo of precision missiles; even 1,000 high-end missiles might cost $1 billion - a great bargain for sinking an aircraft carrier, whose defenses might have to shoot down 99% or more in order to survive.
One counter-measure the US Navy is investing in is "distributed lethality": rather than concentrating investment and capability in one very attractive target (aircraft carriers), they want to put missiles and other capabilities on every ship, from destroyers to cargo ships, so the enemy can't take down your naval power with a few missiles. That's part of the reason, I would guess, for nuclear cruise missiles on Zumwalt destroyers.
20 cents of lead can kill a soldier. Are soldiers obsolete?
10,000 dollars of RPG can destroy an M1 Abrams. Is the Abrams obsolete?
A single SAM site can destroy an entire squadron of F-16s. Are F-16s obsolete?
Well...no. There is an ocean of difference between "can" and "will". Especially for something as insanely complicated as an anti-ship non-nuclear (read: needs a direct hit) ballistic missile (read: terminal course correction is going to be a bitch) trying to hit some of the fastest ships in the US Navy dodging like hell while being covered by a blanket of AA fire the likes of which the world hasn't seen since WW2.
There is a very good reason China has recently started constructing its third aircraft carrier, and it's not because it looks pretty when you hang it over the fireplace.
Soldiers (and tanks and F-16s) have effective countermeasures. The difference is that surface ships do not have effective defenses (or will not, when the missile technology matures). Tech does become obsolete; it happened to boarding parties and battleships; aircraft carriers are 80 year old tech, the distance in time between the US Civil War and WWII, and they'll become obsolete some day. I sure hope my side isn't still depending on them when they do - that has been the end of many nations throughout history.
You may not believe it, but it's a pretty broad consensus among experts that I've read. Militaries are investing heavily in that outcome.
E pur si muove
That's what a carrier is: an irreplaceable multi-billion-dollar sitting duck. This was adequately demonstrated by Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who (IIRC) spoiled a major wargaming exercise by spamming the enemy's capital ships with speedboats, USS Cole-style. Of course, the military's response was to change the rules to disallow Zerg rushes. Hopefully the Chinese, Russians, and/or Iranians got their updated copy of the rulebook.
He basically was trying to pull of a peasent railgun, and then got pissy when people told him he still had to obey the laws of physics with his strategies whatever other rules the navy's scenario involved.
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Peasant_Railgun
The idea of "spamming the enemy with speed boats" as a tactic is over 130 years old at this point. It was called "the young school" of naval thought, or Jeune École in its native French. It failed spectacularly in the real world, because militaries need only invest in a few destroyers armed with rapid fire cannons and the entire plan goes belly up. A hundred speed boats were simply no match for one destroyer armed with machine guns.