From Ballpark to Battlespace: Applying Moneyball to Fleet Design
The MOC
By
CDR Dan Justice, USN
October 10, 2025
“Guys, you’re still trying to replace Giambi. I told you we can’t do it, and we can’t do it. Now, what we might be able to do is re-create him. Re-create him in the aggregate” – Moneyball
In the early 2000s the Oakland A’s showed the baseball world you didn’t need superstar salaries to win games. A’s general manager Billy Beane built rosters around undervalued statistics instead of traditional and costly “five-tool” players, proving you can recreate excellence in aggregate. Today, the US Navy is finding its traditional and costly ships aren’t enough to meet the needs of the nation. Defense circles are looking to unmanned vehicles, attritable systems, artificial intelligence, and other non-traditional military technologies and concepts as new ways to generate combat power. Advocates see a coming revolution, skeptics offer notes of reasonable caution and some are pushing back on the promised capabilities and utility of these systems replacing the venerable ships and aircraft of the past. The way to frame these new technologies is the same way the A’s thought about their unconventional players, not as perfect replacements for Cruisers, Attack Submarines, and Multirole Aircraft, but as “Ships in Aggregate.”
The Moneyball system wasn’t about playing baseball, it was about team and personnel management. Beane led the A’s to understand a statistics and metrics based approach to building a team. His central insight was about what actually wins games, producing more runs than the opponent, not about how many wall clearing home runs they could hit or how good the players looked in uniform. And if winning games comes from scoring more runs, getting runs comes from getting on base. In the player market at the time, great home run stats made a player expensive, but OBP (on base percentage) and walk rate were relative bargains despite Beane’s insights of their correlation with wins. Beane built the A’s roster around those undervalued statistics, assembling a team of “misfit” players who hit a lot of singles and got a lot of walks but together they produced the same effects as the far more expensive superstars, recreated in the aggregate. The resulting system delivered wins at a fraction of the cost of rival teams, proving the effectiveness and efficiency of the Moneyball system over traditional roster management methods.
Beane also realized a single snapshot, static approach to team composition wasn’t a long term solution. When the rest of the league caught onto Beane’s insights, the player market shifted. Players with high OBP started to be snatched up by rival teams as well. Beane and the A’s had to adapt, looking at defensive stats and other new metrics in subsequent seasons. The Moneyball lesson wasn’t just that baseball had been looking at the wrong stats, but that the stats had to be considered inside the operating environment and their value shifted as the environment changed. Beane famously trusted the math and the system over institutional tradition and intuition. He resisted the pressure to build a team based on what it “should” look like but built one instead that could deliver wins, even as the game shifted.
What is “on-base percentage” for the Navy? It isn’t ship count, tonnage, or photos of rust free ships on social media. The Navy’s OBP is the ability to deliver effects that matter, at the time and place of the commander’s choosing. In baseball, a “five-tool player” could hit for average, hit for power, run, field, and throw. Jason Giambi was one of those stars for the A’s, but he left Oakland in 2001 for a $120 million free agent contract, forcing them to rebuild their roster, replacing him “in aggregate.” For the Navy, the Virginia-class submarine is an example of an equivalent five-tool player. It can hunt submarines, sink ships, strike ashore, gather intelligence, and show the flag, but they cost $4.5 billion apiece, and we can’t build enough of them as quickly as we need to. A Moneyball fleet strategy asks how to deliver those Virginia class effects in aggregate – cheaper, faster, and in greater quantity.
By arranging a number of novel technologies together, what might a SSN “in aggregate” look like? A submarine’s Anti-Submarine warfare role could be approximated by a variety of sea based assets, more T-AGOS surveillance ships, fixed seabed arrays, and UUVs such as Orca, Ghost Shark, or Manta Ray. Airborne ASW already commonly employs the P-8, but long endurance airborne surveillance could extend time on station, perhaps from unconventional; platforms. None of these systems alone is as powerful or versatile as a Virginia in the ASW mission, but together they can deliver the core ASW effects.
Other warfare areas’ effects can also be met by novel systems. A fleet of armed USVs, coastal missile batteries, and smart mines have the potential to deliver the anti-ship capabilities of a SSN. For strike warfare, the 40 VLS cells of a Virginia block V represent an impressive amount of firepower, but for a fraction of the cost, some of that bang might be augmented with containerized VLS systems, unmanned VLS barges or land based fires. Similarly, ISR—traditionally a SSN’s specialty—can be built up through ISR-focused UUVs and USVs, high-altitude long-endurance UAVs, and commercial satellite data buys. None of these systems alone can do everything a Virginia can, but in the aggregate they can create the effects required to “score runs and win games.”
The hardest effect to replicate may be the presence and messaging effects of a manned submarine or ship. Submarines may be the silent service, but their ability to surface simultaneously around the globe or host allied leaders sends powerful and loud strategic signals. The same can be said for any class of ship. These are missions that require the personal touch and cannot be replaced by any particular technology or unmanned system. But presence doesn’t need to come from a big grey hull with a senior officer aboard, there is space to augment with less expensive solutions that can be equally effective. Smaller ships with junior commanders can still show the flag at international exercises, without billion dollar price tags. Robust public affairs teams with flyaway capacity can magnify operational messaging on the ground, while even unconventional tools, like the Navy band, can generate strategic goodwill at minimal cost. Presence may be hard to automate, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.
The second insight to learn from Moneyball is the need to iterate. For the A’s iteration meant adjusting as rival clubs caught onto Beane’s strategy. Once OBP became fashionable, it was no longer cheap. The Navy’s fleet design, unlike the baseball player market, isn’t a closed system. If adversaries begin adopting similar low cost tech solutions, that doesn’t necessarily preclude us from continuing to do so. For the Navy, iteration and agility will matter most as technology and warfare evolve. The Navy must be ready to abandon platforms, systems, and potentially entire warfare areas as they become too costly to keep pace. For example, if adversary submarine quieting technologies reach the point where acoustic detection and tracking becomes prohibitively expensive, the bargains of T-AGOS or fixed arrays might disappear. Despite the sunk cost and institutional momentum of those methods, the test of a Moneyball fleet is to be able to adapt and pivot. No system can remain competitive forever.
The final lesson from Moneyball is to trust the system. Billy Beane famously didn’t watch the A’s play; once he had built the roster he didn’t dwell on each pitch or inning. Sometimes players would bat worse than expected, sometimes they caught some lucky balls. Those were noise, his job was to build a system that could win over the long season, and trust the players to play. A Moneyball fleet is in essence the same. It does not dictate tactics for a single engagement. It’s likely that in wartime unmanned systems would need to be attritable and losses will occur to manned platforms. Individual engagements might lose a number of individual systems, or they might go surprisingly well. Overall though, the fleet design is one that together delivers the right effects across a long campaign. Once the roster is built, affordable, networked, and effective, we need to give it to our sailors, let them train with it and trust they’ll use it to win.
Commander Dan Justice is a U.S. Navy Foreign Area Officer currently serving as the Federal Executive Fellow with RAND. Previously he has held roles in Policy Analysis and International Armaments Cooperation in addition to operational assignments.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views or policy of the U.S. Defense Department, the Department of the Navy nor the U.S. government. No federal endorsement is implied or intended.
Center for Maritime Strategy
By CDR Dan Justice, USN
“Guys, you’re still trying to replace Giambi. I told you we can’t do it, and we can’t do it. Now, what we might be able to do is re-create him. Re-create him in the aggregate” – Moneyball
In the early 2000s the Oakland A’s showed the baseball world you didn’t need superstar salaries to win games. A’s general manager Billy Beane built rosters around undervalued statistics instead of traditional and costly “five-tool” players, proving you can recreate excellence in aggregate. Today, the US Navy is finding its traditional and costly ships aren’t enough to meet the needs of the nation. Defense circles are looking to unmanned vehicles, attritable systems, artificial intelligence, and other non-traditional military technologies and concepts as new ways to generate combat power. Advocates see a coming revolution, skeptics offer notes of reasonable caution and some are pushing back on the promised capabilities and utility of these systems replacing the venerable ships and aircraft of the past. The way to frame these new technologies is the same way the A’s thought about their unconventional players, not as perfect replacements for Cruisers, Attack Submarines, and Multirole Aircraft, but as “Ships in Aggregate.”
The Moneyball system wasn’t about playing baseball, it was about team and personnel management. Beane led the A’s to understand a statistics and metrics based approach to building a team. His central insight was about what actually wins games, producing more runs than the opponent, not about how many wall clearing home runs they could hit or how good the players looked in uniform. And if winning games comes from scoring more runs, getting runs comes from getting on base. In the player market at the time, great home run stats made a player expensive, but OBP (on base percentage) and walk rate were relative bargains despite Beane’s insights of their correlation with wins. Beane built the A’s roster around those undervalued statistics, assembling a team of “misfit” players who hit a lot of singles and got a lot of walks but together they produced the same effects as the far more expensive superstars, recreated in the aggregate. The resulting system delivered wins at a fraction of the cost of rival teams, proving the effectiveness and efficiency of the Moneyball system over traditional roster management methods.
Beane also realized a single snapshot, static approach to team composition wasn’t a long term solution. When the rest of the league caught onto Beane’s insights, the player market shifted. Players with high OBP started to be snatched up by rival teams as well. Beane and the A’s had to adapt, looking at defensive stats and other new metrics in subsequent seasons. The Moneyball lesson wasn’t just that baseball had been looking at the wrong stats, but that the stats had to be considered inside the operating environment and their value shifted as the environment changed. Beane famously trusted the math and the system over institutional tradition and intuition. He resisted the pressure to build a team based on what it “should” look like but built one instead that could deliver wins, even as the game shifted.
What is “on-base percentage” for the Navy? It isn’t ship count, tonnage, or photos of rust free ships on social media. The Navy’s OBP is the ability to deliver effects that matter, at the time and place of the commander’s choosing. In baseball, a “five-tool player” could hit for average, hit for power, run, field, and throw. Jason Giambi was one of those stars for the A’s, but he left Oakland in 2001 for a $120 million free agent contract, forcing them to rebuild their roster, replacing him “in aggregate.” For the Navy, the Virginia-class submarine is an example of an equivalent five-tool player. It can hunt submarines, sink ships, strike ashore, gather intelligence, and show the flag, but they cost $4.5 billion apiece, and we can’t build enough of them as quickly as we need to. A Moneyball fleet strategy asks how to deliver those Virginia class effects in aggregate – cheaper, faster, and in greater quantity.
By arranging a number of novel technologies together, what might a SSN “in aggregate” look like? A submarine’s Anti-Submarine warfare role could be approximated by a variety of sea based assets, more T-AGOS surveillance ships, fixed seabed arrays, and UUVs such as Orca, Ghost Shark, or Manta Ray. Airborne ASW already commonly employs the P-8, but long endurance airborne surveillance could extend time on station, perhaps from unconventional; platforms. None of these systems alone is as powerful or versatile as a Virginia in the ASW mission, but together they can deliver the core ASW effects.
Other warfare areas’ effects can also be met by novel systems. A fleet of armed USVs, coastal missile batteries, and smart mines have the potential to deliver the anti-ship capabilities of a SSN. For strike warfare, the 40 VLS cells of a Virginia block V represent an impressive amount of firepower, but for a fraction of the cost, some of that bang might be augmented with containerized VLS systems, unmanned VLS barges or land based fires. Similarly, ISR—traditionally a SSN’s specialty—can be built up through ISR-focused UUVs and USVs, high-altitude long-endurance UAVs, and commercial satellite data buys. None of these systems alone can do everything a Virginia can, but in the aggregate they can create the effects required to “score runs and win games.”
The hardest effect to replicate may be the presence and messaging effects of a manned submarine or ship. Submarines may be the silent service, but their ability to surface simultaneously around the globe or host allied leaders sends powerful and loud strategic signals. The same can be said for any class of ship. These are missions that require the personal touch and cannot be replaced by any particular technology or unmanned system. But presence doesn’t need to come from a big grey hull with a senior officer aboard, there is space to augment with less expensive solutions that can be equally effective. Smaller ships with junior commanders can still show the flag at international exercises, without billion dollar price tags. Robust public affairs teams with flyaway capacity can magnify operational messaging on the ground, while even unconventional tools, like the Navy band, can generate strategic goodwill at minimal cost. Presence may be hard to automate, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.
The second insight to learn from Moneyball is the need to iterate. For the A’s iteration meant adjusting as rival clubs caught onto Beane’s strategy. Once OBP became fashionable, it was no longer cheap. The Navy’s fleet design, unlike the baseball player market, isn’t a closed system. If adversaries begin adopting similar low cost tech solutions, that doesn’t necessarily preclude us from continuing to do so. For the Navy, iteration and agility will matter most as technology and warfare evolve. The Navy must be ready to abandon platforms, systems, and potentially entire warfare areas as they become too costly to keep pace. For example, if adversary submarine quieting technologies reach the point where acoustic detection and tracking becomes prohibitively expensive, the bargains of T-AGOS or fixed arrays might disappear. Despite the sunk cost and institutional momentum of those methods, the test of a Moneyball fleet is to be able to adapt and pivot. No system can remain competitive forever.
The final lesson from Moneyball is to trust the system. Billy Beane famously didn’t watch the A’s play; once he had built the roster he didn’t dwell on each pitch or inning. Sometimes players would bat worse than expected, sometimes they caught some lucky balls. Those were noise, his job was to build a system that could win over the long season, and trust the players to play. A Moneyball fleet is in essence the same. It does not dictate tactics for a single engagement. It’s likely that in wartime unmanned systems would need to be attritable and losses will occur to manned platforms. Individual engagements might lose a number of individual systems, or they might go surprisingly well. Overall though, the fleet design is one that together delivers the right effects across a long campaign. Once the roster is built, affordable, networked, and effective, we need to give it to our sailors, let them train with it and trust they’ll use it to win.
Commander Dan Justice is a U.S. Navy Foreign Area Officer currently serving as the Federal Executive Fellow with RAND. Previously he has held roles in Policy Analysis and International Armaments Cooperation in addition to operational assignments.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views or policy of the U.S. Defense Department, the Department of the Navy nor the U.S. government. No federal endorsement is implied or intended.