foreignpolicy.com: The Pentagon Has a Plan to Stop the Zombie Apocalypse. Seriously.

[Critical Thinker]

Always important to read the full article....

Link

Exclusive: The Pentagon Has a Plan to Stop the Zombie Apocalypse. Seriously.
Everything you need to know about the U.S. military’s defense strategy to protect humanity from the walking dead.

• BY GORDON LUBOLD
• MAY 13, 2014
• GORDON.LUBOLD
• @GLUBOLD

SHARE +

• MILITARY
• MILITARY STRATEGY
• NORTH AMERICA

The U.S. military has always been the one place in government with a plan, forever in preparation mode and ready to yank a blueprint off the shelf for almost any contingency. Need a response for a Russian nuclear missile launch? Check. Have to rescue a U.S. ambassador kidnapped by drug lords? Yup, check, got that covered. How about a detailed strategy for surviving a zombie apocalypse? As it turns out, check.

Incredibly, the Defense Department has a response if zombies attacked and the armed forces had to eradicate flesh-eating walkers in order to "preserve the sanctity of human life" among all the "non-zombie humans."

Buried on the military's secret computer network is an unclassified document, obtained by Foreign Policy, called "CONOP 8888." It's a zombie survival plan, a how-to guide for military planners trying to isolate the threat from a menu of the undead -- from chicken zombies to vegetarian zombies and even "evil magic zombies" -- and destroy them.

"This plan fulfills fictional contingency planning guidance tasking for U.S. Strategic Command to develop a comprehensive [plan] to undertake military operations to preserve 'non-zombie' humans from the threats posed by a zombie horde," CONOP 8888's plan summary reads. "Because zombies pose a threat to all non-zombie human life, [Strategic Command] will be prepared to preserve the sanctity of human life and conduct operations in support of any human population -- including traditional adversaries."

CONOP 8888, otherwise known as "Counter-Zombie Dominance" and dated April 30, 2011, is no laughing matter, and yet of course it is. As its authors note in the document's "disclaimer section," "this plan was not actually designed as a joke."

Military planners assigned to the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska during 2009 and 2010 looked for a creative way to devise a planning document to protect citizens in the event of an attack of any kind. The officers used zombies as their muse. "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 authors wrote, adding: "Rather than risk such an outcome by teaching our augmentees using the fictional 'Tunisia' or 'Nigeria' scenarios used at [Joint Combined Warfighting School], we elected to use a completely-impossible scenario that could never be mistaken for a real plan."

Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze, a spokeswoman for Strategic Command, acknowledged the document exists on a "secure Internet site" but took pains to explain that the zombie survival guide is only a creative endeavor for training purposes. "The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development through a fictional training scenario," she wrote in an email. "This document is not a U.S. Strategic Command plan."

This isn't the first time zombies have been used to inspire trainers or the American public. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) built an entire public awareness campaign for emergency preparedness around zombies. "Get a kit, make a plan, be prepared," one CDC poster warns as a dead-eyed woman peeks over a blanket.

But the military appears to have come up with the idea first. And of course, should there be a zombie apocalypse, the military indeed has a plan.

CONOP 8888 is designed to "establish and maintain a vigilant defensive condition aimed at protecting humankind from zombies," according to the plan's purpose, and, "if necessary, conduct operations that will, if directed, eradicate zombie threats to human safety." Finally, the plan provides guidance to "aid civil authorities in maintaining law and order and restoring basic services during and after a zombie attack."

The "worst case threat scenario," according to the plan, suggests a rather dark situation: a zombie attack in which there would be high "transmissibility," lots of zombies eating lots of people, zombies infecting humans at a rapid rate, and little or no immunity and few effective countermeasures.

Under "Zombie Threat Summary," the plan highlights the different kinds of zombie adversaries one might find in such an attack. They include not only vegetarian zombies ("zombie life forms originating from any cause but pose no direct threat to humans because they only eat plant life"); evil magic zombies ("EMZs are zombie life forms created via some form of occult experimentation in what might otherwise be referred to as 'evil magic'"); and also chicken zombies.

"Although it sounds ridiculous, this is actually the only proven class of zombie that actually exists," the plan states. So-called "CZs" occur when old hens that can no longer lay eggs are euthanized by farmers with carbon monoxide, buried, and then claw their way back to the surface. "CZs are simply terrifying to behold and are likely only to make people become vegetarians in protest to animal cruelty," CONOP 8888 notes.



The catalog of the walking dead also includes zombies that come from outer space; those deliberately created by Frankensteinian bio-engineers; and humans that have been invaded by a pathogen that turns them into zombies.
The catalog of the walking dead also includes zombies that come from outer space; those deliberately created by Frankensteinian bio-engineers; and humans that have been invaded by a pathogen that turns them into zombies.


The plan reviews, extensively, the various phases of saving the world from zombie rule and reads not unlike the phases of a counterinsurgency campaign: from "shape" to "deter" to "seize initiative" to "dominate" to "stabilize" and, finally, in the final, confidence-building phase, "restore civil authority." That final phase includes the directive to "prepare to redeploy the forces to attack surviving zombie holdouts."

Finally, "[a]s directed by POTUS and SECDEF," using military-ese for the president of the United States and the defense secretary, "provide support to federal, state and tribal agencies' efforts to restore basic services in zombie-related disaster areas."

If the military's mantra is to "be prepared," then writing a zombie survival guide -- even if it is just for an imaginative exercise -- makes sense. "I hope we've invested a similar level of intellectual rigor against dragon egg hatching contingencies," one defense official quipped.

Content from external source

 

[Mick West]

Key bit there:

Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze, a spokeswoman for Strategic Command, acknowledged the document exists on a "secure Internet site" but took pains to explain that the zombie survival guide is only a creative endeavor for training purposes. "The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development through a fictional training scenario," she wrote in an email. "This document is not a U.S. Strategic Command plan."

Content from external source

 

[deirdre]

i should buy some flame thrower stocks before this goes viral (no pun intended)

 

[Jason]

Key bit there:

Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze, a spokeswoman for Strategic Command, acknowledged the document exists on a "secure Internet site" but took pains to explain that the zombie survival guide is only a creative endeavor for training purposes. "The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development through a fictional training scenario," she wrote in an email. "This document is not a U.S. Strategic Command plan."

Content from external source

I also think this kind of training exercise focuses mostly on an outbreak (virus, pathogen, or bacterial). This gives our troops the training on how to deal with such a situation if necessary, and I think the author is right in saying;

"Rather than risk such an outcome by teaching our augmentees using the fictional 'Tunisia' or 'Nigeria' scenarios used at [Joint Combined Warfighting School], we elected to use a completely-impossible scenario that could never be mistaken for a real plan."

If they were to use viral outbreak or some other similar language it would be construed as a real upcoming event, possibly causing panic and obviously a great deal of CT's would pursue. By lableling it a Zombie Survival Guide, it becomes laughable and implausable. Sure CT's will transpire from this, but they won't amount to anything.... Smartly done..

 

[Hevach]

The Pentagon has plans for a lot of weird stuff. Every once in a while something strange gets declassified, like a plan to invade Canada or the takeover of a NATO member state by the rest of NATO, and people act like this is something they thought would happen.

The military wants its strategy people to be flexible, to be able to formulate a battle plan promptly in the event of an unknown or unexpected change of circumstance. Having them spend their entire careers re-running the same few likely/plausible scenarios with slightly changing forces and weapons doesn't make them flexible. Having them play the world like a game of Civ with only the fun victory conditions does.

And, like Jason said: The less plausible their busywork actually is, the less likely people are to misconstrue it as a real plan.