Out at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, soldiers are experimenting with turning some of their Humvees and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles into mechanized equivalents of the Mongol strawmen. “Ghost Ships” are armored trucks without drivers, controlled remotely by drivers in the back seats of other vehicles in a squad.
The hope is that the empty truck will be the one that runs over the improvised explosive device, sparing the ones with soldiers inside. At the least, the Ghost Ship decreases the likelihood that a soldier will be injured or killed.
Sure, it’s not exactly a true ghostridden whip of the sort the Bay Area invented. (That’s more for base protection.) Then again, nothing in the Ghost Ship stops a soldier from putting it in neutral and dancing on it. The remote driver’s rig comes with pedals, a steering wheel, cameras and a monitor display. Soldiers seem to like it.
“It would be a great advantage [against] the IED threat to put a remote vehicle as the lead vehicle,” Pfc. Antonio DeAnda, one of the soldiers testing the Ghost Ships, told National Defense, undoubtedly making the Thizz Face. “It could take the blast and we could recover the vehicle.”
If they can recover the vehicle, that is. Lots of homemade bomb blasts don’t rip through the truck’s hull. But many do, and even the weak bombs, properly positioned, can disable an MRAP or Humvee. It’s one thing to have a fleet of ground robots taking point in the hope of detecting and disrupting a bomb or absorbing its blast. Those things cost thousands of dollars. Army trucks cost millions. The Army’s supposed to be out of money, remember?
The Mongols’ dummy cavalrymen gambit succeeded because the Mongols had horses in abundance. An MRAP or a Humvee, even as a Ghost Ship, costs just a little bit more.
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