Zombie mania has come to the Pentagon, and I’m not talking about a “Walking Dead” film festival. The federal government has designed a very real contingency plan in the event that zombies attempt to overrun the country. A spokesman for the Pentagon assures us that we’re not in danger…Not at all. This is all just a fun way those madcap military types dreamed up to prepare for a non-zombie emergency! They’re like that, you know.
The Defense Department maintains a disaster preparation document called “CONOP 8888” which is actually a zombie survival plan. The plan is intended to train commanders in the art of strategizing for a catastrophe – of a different sort, or so they say. The Defense Department has over $500 billion to throw around. If they want to play zombie killers, they can call it a “how to guide for military planners” trying to save the population from an onslaught of the undead…It sounds so much more official.
Planners have gone to great pains to detail various types of zombies and the various methods one might use to control them…Or rather, the unknown crazies who might attack. Could they truly be thinking of space aliens, or maybe just a better way of controlling shoppers on Black Friday? It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? See more details below.
The zombie offensive is part of what the DoD calls “fictional contingency planning guidance” that asks military commanders to come up with a blueprint to “preserve non-zombie humans from the threat posed by a zombie horde,” Foreign Policy reported, citing an unclassified Pentagon document. Without a hint of irony, DoD calls the plan “Counter-Zombie Dominance,” and added in the disclaimer section that “this plan was not actually designed as a joke.” The “worst case threat scenario,” according to the plan, would be high “transmissibility,” —legions of the undead infecting humans rapidly, with little way to counter rapidly multiplying hordes of zombies.
According to Foreign Policy, military strategists assigned to Omaha’s U.S. Strategic Command wrote the document in April 2011, as part of game plan to protect citizens against any kind of threat. “Planners … realized that training examples for plans must accommodate the political fallout that occurs if the general public mistakenly believes that a fictional training scenario is actually a real plan,” the plan’s authors wrote.
They added that “we elected to use a completely-impossible scenario that could never be mistaken for a real plan.”
A spokesperson for U.S. Strategic Command distanced the Pentagon from the document, telling Foreign Policy in a statement that the zombie plan was merely a “training tool” that uses a “fictional training scenario. This document is not a U.S. Strategic Command plan.”