Lexington's eight-inch guns and the case for escorts

The objection to Lexington's eight-inch battery centers on placing heavy guns, armor, and supporting weight high on a carrier whose starboard island already created an imbalance. Before the London Treaty, the absence of a cumulative cruiser limit offered an alternative: build an escorting cruiser to handle surface threats. The preferred arrangement here is smaller dual-purpose guns about one deck below flight-deck level, where they retain useful firing arcs without adding as much topweight. Four-and-a-half-inch or five-inch mounts could engage aircraft and help repel destroyers that penetrated the escort. This is a design preference, and the criticism acknowledges that the US Navy had not yet developed the escort doctrine being proposed.