Bureau politics kept heavy guns on the carriers

The eight-inch battery was an institutional choice rather than an unavoidable technical requirement. Later American criticism blamed the Bureau of Ships and Bureau of Ordnance, whose officials retained gun-centered design assumptions and did not understand aircraft operations well enough. Their insistence that a major warship must carry major guns added weight and operational conflicts to a platform whose real defensive advantages were speed, aircraft, and escorts. The decision shows how established organizations can carry older assumptions into a new technology.