GHOST. From right to left: Motoko Kusanagi, Standard, Ishikawa, Batou, and Saito
GHOST is a mercenary unit in Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. It was formed by Motoko Kusanagi following the dissolution of Public Security Section 9. Its members included Batou, Ishikawa, Saito, and two Tachikomas, as well as American recruit Standard.
GHOST served as soldiers-for-hire in the Sustainable War engineered by the G4 nations (the Russian Federation, China, the European Union, and the American Empire) to keep their economies afloat. In 2045, GHOST was hired by the wealthy elites of a city in war-torn California to guard it against raider attacks. They capture a group of raiders, bankrupted college football players supplied with high-end weaponry by "the Good One-percenter", but fail to prevent a missile from impacting a mansion within the city and lose their contract. GHOST is then hired by John Smith of the National Security Agency to capture Patrick Huge, a robotics entrepreneur who had been transformed into a post-human. Smith intended to kill GHOST after they had completed their task, but was stopped at the last minute by an order from the American president; the president had himself been contacted by the Japanese prime minister Chris Otomo Tate, who needed GHOST's members alive to reestablish Section 9 under Daisuke Aramaki.
With Section 9 reborn to investigate the post-human phenomenon, GHOST was disbanded.