Why Lexington's tonnage breach mattered more than cruiser cheating

Why are Japanese cruisers usually remembered as the major treaty violation rather than the overweight Lexington-class carriers?

Cruiser excesses broke a unit limit, while Lexington and Saratoga also consumed more of the United States' total carrier allowance than declared, making their breach strategically more consequential.

Japanese cruisers are often remembered as the treaty system's best-known offenders, but cruisers faced only a per-ship ceiling under the Washington agreement. The Lexington-class conversions were allowed 33,000 tons plus an additional allowance for air-defense and anti-submarine improvements, yet the completed carriers still exceeded the resulting figure. Lexington and Saratoga therefore affected both their individual conversion limits and the United States' cumulative carrier allowance. Understating them distorted the permitted carrier fleet twice by hiding weight in each ship and preserving paper tonnage for the wider program. That accounting difference made the American carrier breach strategically more consequential than a similarly overweight cruiser.