The phrase ghost drones has slipped into defense conversation with an almost poetic ambiguity. At once it is a product name, a class of loitering munitions, and a tactics shorthand for anything that appears on a sensor but lacks obvious substance. That ambiguity matters because doctrine, procurement, and tactics respond differently to each meaning. This piece parses the permutations of ghost drones, the hard technical levers that make them effective or fragile, and the operational tradeoffs defense planners must face.

Product names that haunt the headlines

Some of the most visible manifestations of the ghost label are proper names. Anduril Industries markets a small unmanned aircraft called Ghost and has iterated that family into Ghost-X, a vehicle the company and U.S. services have been testing for expeditionary reconnaissance, perimeter security, and force protection. Public reporting around DoD contracts and exercises documents both the service interest and field experimentation with Ghost variants, including demonstrations during Project Convergence and Air Force contracts to refine autonomy.

Those commercial and startup platforms are designed with a set of engineering tradeoffs in mind: quiet acoustic signature, VTOL convenience, sufficient endurance for tactical overwatch, and modular payloads for EO/IR or small electronic payloads. When a manufacturer brands a platform Ghost the implication is not supernatural stealth but optimized low observability in one or more signature domains acoustic, visual, thermal, or RF. The tactical utility comes down to how those signature reductions interact with the enemy’s sensorkit and rules of engagement.

When a ghost becomes a kamikaze

A second meaning is the loitering munition family that has used ghost terminology in recent policy and press discussions. The Phoenix Ghost program, developed by Aevex and supplied to Ukraine under U.S. security assistance, is an explicit example. Public disclosures in 2024 revealed that Phoenix Ghost is not a single tube launched munition but a family with different sizes, endurance bands, and launch methods aimed at extended loitering and deeper strikes than earlier small kamikaze drones. Those platforms trade portability for reach and endurance, and some variants are described as having multihour endurance and group 2 and group 3 size characteristics.

Operationally the loitering-munition meaning of ghost has two consequences. First, endurance and beyond-line-of-sight navigation enable strikes against time sensitive or fleeting targets with less forward logistics than manned aircraft. Second, they raise PNT resilience problems; GPS denial in high intensity zones forces platform designers to invest in alternative navigation sensors and algorithms, which increases costs and development time. Those investments show up in guidance stacks, inertial navigation augmentation, visual odometry and anti-jam comms, not in spooky marketing copy.

Ghosts that are not there at all: decoys and electronic ghosts

The third usage is the most operationally consequential: a ghost that appears to sensors but lacks a meaningful kinetic payload. Modern electronic warfare and active expendables make the creation of false or manipulated targets an engineering problem that is both solved and scalable. Systems like Leonardo’s BriteCloud demonstrate how digital RF memory and active expendables can present an adversary radar with a convincing false target signature in real time, tricking tracking radars or missile seekers into locking the expendable rather than the defended asset. The technique is essentially an electronic ghost in the radar picture.

At the lab level researchers have shown that even low cost backscatter transponders can create spurious targets on FMCW radars by modulating returned signals to simulate distance and velocity. That work is specific, replicable, and important because it demonstrates that false targets do not require a second full radar system to spoof a primary sensor. A small transponder with the right modulation can produce believable ghost blips across a range of radar geometries.

On the battlefield low cost decoy airframes and RF spoofing can be combined to create mixed packages that overload defenders. Reports and assessments in 2024 documented increased use of unarmed imitation drones in large strike packages intended to force defenders to expend interceptors and to reveal air defense and EW node locations. Ukrainian forces and analytic centers recorded episodes where dozens to hundreds of small projectiles included many that appeared to be decoys or that were degraded by EW into disappearing traces on radar, producing what tactical commanders call ghost tracks. Those dynamics change the economics of air defense because costly interceptors are expended against low value or fake targets.

What makes a credible ghost on sensors

Mapping the technical chain from actor intent to sensor effect clarifies where to intervene. A credible ghost needs one or more of the following:

  • Radar cross section mimicking. Physical decoys can be shaped and fitted with reflectors or Luneburg lenses to look like larger drones or small cruise missiles on radar.
  • RF signature replication. DRFM or tailored active decoys can replay or synthesize a radar return timed and Doppler shifted to arrive as a believable track.
  • Visual/thermal mimicry. Paint, lighting, or thermal shrouds that produce an expected IR signature or silhouette reduce visual confirmation probabilities.
  • Command and control complexity. Swarms, timing, and multiple vector approaches multiply the defender’s decision space and increase the chance they’ll accept a false positive as a legitimate shot opportunity.

A ghost need not satisfy all four vectors. Even a simple plywood airframe that produces an expected radar return forces defenders into difficult, costly decisions.

Tactical and systems implications

The proliferation of ghost meanings amplifies three practical problems for militaries and planners.

First, sensor fusion rules become harder. When radar, EO, and signals intelligence disagree or present ambiguous cues, automated trackers and human operators must have clear classification thresholds. That requires fast, validated algorithms and also doctrine that tolerates uncertainty without defaulting to the most expensive kinetic remedy.

Second, logistics and procurement must accept a new cost calculus. Cheaper decoys and expendable jammers shift some value away from single expensive interceptors and toward capacity to launch discriminating interceptors or to sustain layered EW. In short, quantity reasserts itself in certain mission sets even in a high tech era. This is an engineering and budget problem, not an ethics problem. Intelligence, acquisition, and sustainment pipelines must be aligned to buy numbers as well as capability.

Third, autonomy and AI matter because classification and engagement timelines compress as swarm sizes grow. Autonomy can help filter false tracks and recommend nonkinetic responses, but autonomous decision systems need rigorous testing in adversarial conditions where ghosts are deliberately injected. The robustness of perception stacks under spoofing and multipath conditions is critical. Lab demonstrations of radar spoofing show the vulnerabilities are real.

Ethics, escalation, and the fog of deception

Ghost drones widen an already fuzzy moral field. Deliberate use of decoys that mimic civilian infrastructure or that create false signals in civilian airspace complicates compliance with international humanitarian law because deception can produce misidentification and collateral damage. The use of inexpensive decoys to force defenders to waste expensive interceptors is legal under the law of armed conflict, but the downstream effects on civilian systems and on the frequency of false alarms in critical regions must be weighed. Transparency with partners on rules for sensor classification and checkpoint engagement helps preserve proportionality.

Recommendations for planners and industry

1) Invest in multimodal verification. Fusion of RF, EO, and passive acoustic signatures reduces single-sensor exploitability. Automated heuristics should be tuned using adversarial testbeds that include DRFM and low cost backscatter tags.

2) Buy intercept capacity at scale. Planners should model the economics of decoy-saturated strike packages and fund interceptor inventories and lower cost COP-persistent launch options accordingly. Those models must be exercised in war games that include saturation and deception playbooks.

3) Harden PNT and navigation. Loitering munitions with multihour endurance are valuable, but only if they can navigate under jamming. Alternative PNT stacks and resilient comms must be part of procurement requirements for long-range loitering assets.

4) Test autonomy under adversarial conditions. Ghost branded platforms and loitering munitions that rely on autonomy must be validated against spoofed sensor feeds and realistic EW. The Air Force and Army contracts and exercises around Ghost and Ghost-X are the right places to force those tests before wider fielding.

Concluding note

On Halloween the metaphors are fun. In theatre and doctrine we can no longer afford to anthropomorphize the technology. Ghosts in modern warfare are engineered objects with measurable signatures and predictable vulnerabilities. Name or tactic, the important questions are technical resilience, sensor fusion, and logistics. The teams that treat ghost drones as solvable engineering problems rather than as mythic threats will outcompete adversaries who lean on ambiguity as a tactic.