The cloaking devices we used in the Army operated by physically shifting the vehicle & it’s contents out of phase with current space. It was eerie to be on board when cloaked as the landscape was only slightly more visible than we were–which wasn’t much! Typically we had to navigate completely by instruments that would keep a virtual map of “our” space and “real” space to keep us from getting lost or “uncloaking” inside another object. We had to “uncloak” to fire in order to move the ordinance into the same physical “plane” as the target.
Energy consumption for the device was pretty incredible, but not unmanageable. Energy to run the device was used only when shifting in/out of phase. Once you got to where you were going you were done. Onboard monitors prevented us shifting without sufficient power for the “return trip” as we called it, but occasionally a unit would shift after receiving a hit to the main generator and run low on power while out of phase. Because each unit was programmed to shift slightly out of phase from others in the column–to prevent mishaps that couldn’t be serviced-- It was a hairy bitch trying to find one of those! You had first to identify the unit, get it’s 5th dimension coordinate from HQ which could take days, and then shift to that location & start looking. I can’t imagine trying to do a recovery operation in space!
But, in answer to the OP, it’s a technology issue. A cloaking device is too bulky to put on a warhead, so the vehicle itself needs to do all the work. In order to hit your target, you have to get back into its same 5th dimension, which makes you “visible.” I don’t know what those crackheads on Star Trek were thinking about. Maybe by the 6th film they were hinting at a new technology which would warp space/around the craft–this was tried and discarded long ago because of the “seam” which left part of the craft exposed. Phase shifting is much more secure.
