Zombies are undead creatures, typically
depicted as mindless, reanimated human corpses with a hunger for human flesh.
Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term
comes from Haitian folklore (Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi)
where a zombie is a dead body animated by magic. Modern depictions of zombies
do not necessarily involve magic but invoke other methods such as a virus
(Wikipedia)
The at least
expected place where you will look for pranksters is Pentagon. Therefore, the
plan to fight living dead, created by Pentagon experts is not elaborated hoax,
but the real, developed by experts military plan. So, if you have nightmares,
originated by the horror TV serials and similarly horrible electronic games,
get rest. Indeed, no need to fear the night of the living dead -- the Pentagon
has got you covered.
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 is not 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," many
zombies eating many 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 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."
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