Zombie Apocalypse? The Pentagon Has A Plan
from the the-best-braaaaains dept
If you're like me, you might be surprised to learn just where zombies turn up. For instance, an undead king-o-pop might show up in a video game. Or in a humor-driven warning from the Center for Disease Control. Or, as it turns out, amongst contingency plans by the Pentagon.
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.Ah, the undead sure do create cause for such strange bedfellows. It's a little bit heartwarming that the Pentagon would see fit to team up with our more-human adversaries against the zombie horde, isn't it? Imagine: the Taliban and the American military hand in hand, standing tall and steadfast against wave after wave of the undead. It's equal parts poetic and idealistic.
"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."
Now, lest anyone take this too seriously, like the CDC's warning, the Pentagon would like to stress that they don't actually think that this zombie apocalypse is, you know, going to happen.
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."In other words, rather than risk the paranoid hysteria that would revolve around a false plan to combat a real-life adversary, they made one up. It's actually humanizing to see a little humorous creativity coming from our men and women in uniform. And it appears the creators of the plan really did let their imagination fly. They designed methods to combat vegetarian zombies (yay!), evil magic zombies (sounds ominous), and chicken zombies (run, you stupid bastards!), outer space zombies (genre crossovers are so tired), bio-engineered zombies (calling Umbrella Corp.), and a pathogen-based zombie outbreak. Not all the military brass was impressed with the effort, it seems.
"I hope we've invested a similar level of intellectual rigor against dragon egg hatching contingencies," one defense official quipped.Oh, you silly defense guy, untwist your shorts. Everyone knows there haven't been dragons in these parts in years.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: defense department, pentagon, planning, zombies
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
At least their eating habits would be healthier than regular zombies. You know, all those brains and stuff. /derp
You can always count on the Pentagram for zombies! Er, Pentagon.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The lesson I learned was that it was important to train for disasters, and it didn't really matter what type of disaster you were planning for. Many skills, especially communications, will come into play in any disaster. We developed contacts with other agencies, we collected maps and information resources. My first year there we discovered we had a shortage of barricades for blocking streets. A few years later we discovered that even though we had bought barricades, they had been loaned to another city after that city had a disaster and we had not gotten the barricades back.
I think training or planning for zombies or space aliens or anything else is perfectly fine. In any type of disaster there are going to be similar issues you have to think about -- communications, evacuations, traffic and crowd control, emergency housing, distributing food and water, and medical community support. The important thing is to plan and train for disasters. The Zombie Apocalypse may sound frivolous, but it forces the participants to think and exercise their response skills. If it is a bit bizarre it is also going to force the participants to think a bit outside the box.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
It is sad, really.
/buzzkill
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: It is sad, really.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: It is sad, really.
I, however, disagree. Creating a zombie survival plan requires creativity and imagination. Both those traits are insanely useful in life or death situations that were not predicted.
The problem with an unpredictable cataclysm is that it's inherently unpredictable (Even ones we do plan for could be different from our plans). The survival plan would have to be made up on the fly. The best way to do that is pull different parts from different survival plans and put them together. That requires creativity and imagination (and even a zombie survival plan or two).
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: It is sad, really.
Viral zombie attack - better have clean water and a way to clean water ready - hmm...need that in the event of a major flooding incident.
Zombies always seem to wreak havoc on public utilities, so there is probably preparation in there for power outages as well.
I get their point. They could have planned for a Chinese invasion and then had everyone looking at the plan asking how close we were to a Chinese invasion that we needed to plan for it. Instead, they took a good, general, completely inplausable situation and planned for it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: It is sad, really.
If you reread the article the point for using zombies is to get the critical and useful training done without causing a panic.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: It is sad, really.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: It is sad, really.
I don't think the Chinese invasion version was leaked yet.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It is sad, really.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: It is sad, really.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: It is sad, really.
It looks like the CDC has handed off the responsibility to their "Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response". There's beem some updates to their plan. They even have a online graphic "novella"...to get the word out on preparation.
But not so seriously, a zombie outbreak, or worse, a zombie pandemic does seems like a good example of a disaster where military-civilian coodination would be beneifical. I think we can all agree that this is the kind of disaster where any and all measures needs to be taken to mitigate the negative effects on the population!
This plan might even come in handy if a chryssalid shows up...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: It is sad, really.
http://www.thejc.com/news/on-day/47506/on-day-kishinev-pogrom
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_ and_politics/history/2013/10/mendel_beilis_and_blood_libel_the_1913_trial_in_kiev_russia.html
There is a reference to "vegetarian zombies." Who, in real life, are likely to be vegetarians? Answer: certain groups of Indian-Americans. There have been recent Anti-Semitic episodes in the military, notable a hazing incident at the Air Force Academy, and forced attendance at Sour then Baptist religious ceremonies. Don't treat it as a game. A common characteristic of zombies is that they have names like Masnick. I'd say, on available evidence, that a zombie is about one part Jew, one part Indian-American, one part Chinese, one part Mexican, and one part Secular Humanist. I think we're all Zombies here.
The military recruits from the "dark corners of the land," places like Alabama and Mississippi, where poverty has persisted for generations, places which have never really gotten over the mindset of slavery, and where the Ku Klux Klan is not just an abstraction. A great many recruits have someone, a father, or an uncle, or a grandfather, who... wore the sheet, thirty or forty or fifty years ago. It seems as though the editorial staff of the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger is beginning to get the idea. Like William Faulkner or Harper Lee, they have the advantage of living close to the problem:
" ...Mississippi's consistently low educational rankings and that the quality of the brains might not be up to par for zombie food snobs..."
In other words, it is just another case of "the sinister Jew from San Francisco who is going to corrupt our children and make them into atheists and teach them to program computers."
-------------------------------
Therese Apel, "Pentagon has Zombie apocalypse plan, but does Miss.?," Clarion-Ledger, May 15, 2014
http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2014/05/14/pentagon-plan-zombie-apocalypse-mississippi/9 077257/?from=global&sessionKey=&autologin=
Roberto Scalese, Inside the Secret Gummint Plan to Stop a Zombie Invasion, Boston Globe, May 15, 2014
http://www.boston.com/news/odd/2014/05/15/inside-the-secret-gummint-plan-stop-zombie-invasion/TM zpOvWycLJruI7TVBeqQN/story.html?rss_id=Top-GNP
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: It is sad, really.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
What about Alien Invasion?
So the Pentagon is ready for a Zombie Apocalypse, but not Alien Invasion?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
They have rotten their own brains faster than the nerds of the zombie genre.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Make fun if you want...
Why?
Because looking at this situation pragmatically, if enough disenfranchised humans with serious illness and nothing to lose does occur, then they may behave in ways the behave just like a zombie apocalypse. Basically moving around and intentionally infecting/killing people and some even getting their rocks off on getting into it all.
If you have ever seen how humans can develop cultist overtones then you know that when tensions are high anything can happen. This does not just have to be over political illness either... imagine the possible parallels this has with current day technology and a revolution occurring in the USA itself. This is literally a good way to plan for insurrection while the people laugh it all off as stupid and unworthy of any serious attention.
Always treat anything a government does as serious.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Make fun if you want...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Make fun if you want...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
No, what's more likely is Umbrella lobbied to make the existing plan ineffective, so they could study the outbreak. Umbrella may have also supplied a "cure", at an exorbitant rate, which will be equally ineffective, if not the T-Virus itself.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Contingencies
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Dragon eggs
Disaster planning is mostly just disaster planning. If using zombies as the disaster makes people think creatively, then great.
I'm fine with this.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Dragon eggs
Might he have actually been asking for a plan dealing with dirty bombs and more advanced nuclear threats?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
R&D
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: R&D
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The more gun ownership a state had, the larger it's geographic area, and the fewer people that lived in each square miles, the more safe the state was rated.
And yes, the author of the study was dumb enough to cite it as a reason to buy more guns, in preparation for a possible zombie apocalypse.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Yeah...hey, about those zombies..
http://www.slashgear.com/a-zombie-war-is-raging-in-the-deep-sea-02327409/
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Yeah, good luck with that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_drama)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa lem_witch_trials
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Windshield_Pitting_Epidemic
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]