Center for Maritime Strategy – 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 costlyships 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.”