The US Navy launched a missile from a ghost ship. Wait, what?

I thought ghost ships were naval fleets/ships on covert missions/missions not known to public/missions govt actively denies.

Did the definition of that change?

But I am glad to see unmanned contracts werent completely shutdown.

Ok but why? Does not having crew on board really make the ship better? On airplanes it Make a lot of sense cause weight for crew and high g maneuvers but on ships the crew weight is much less of a concern

During World War 2 Operation Fortitude was responsible for enabling the D Day landings to move inland while Hitler awaited the `real' invasion... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude Similarly agent `Garbo' created (with allied support) a vast network of non-existent subagents all feeding information to the enemy. He received military decorations from both sides! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_Garc%C3%ADa

Doesn't look very ghostly to me. That doesn't have the smooth lines of a stealth design. The closest comparison I can think of is a Q-ship. It looks like an ordinary merchant ship but a Standard can take out most any pirate raider. The SM-6 has active homing, it could take cueing from a drone and sink a pirate from over the horizon. The SM-6 can engage from far beyond the range a Hellfire could.