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5 Strange Facts About The Pentagon’s Anti-Zombie Plan
Credit: Aeviin Talloni.
Live Science
Stephanie Pappas
Citizens of the United States, breathe easy: The Pentagon has a plan in case of a zombie attack.
Don’t pack your bug-out bag and put up your zombie defenses, yet, however. CONPLAN 888, first uncovered this week by Foreign Policy magazine, is not an indication that the Department of Defense has gone off the deep end. The plan, written in 2011, was part of a training exercise.
And a detailed one, at that. The plan summarizes responses to threats ranging from pathogenic zombies (zombies created via infection) to space zombies (what they sound like) to chicken zombies (they really exist!). Here’s what you need to know.
1. It’s not (exactly) a joke
The U.S. military is not actually expecting the country to be overrun by zombies. But the work and thought that went into making the plan was very real. [Everything You Need to Know About Zombies (Infographic)]
“During the summers of 2009 and 2010, while training augmentees from a local training squadron about the JOPP [Joint Operation Planning Process], members of a USSTRATCOM [U.S. Strategic Command] component found out (by accident) that the hyperbole involved in writing a “zombie survival plan” actually provided a very useful and effective training tool.”
Joint operation planning involves organizing between multiple branches of the military. It’s a complex task, and training can be fraught. If real countries are detailed in the plan, the public might mistakenly believe the plans are real. Using zombies gets around that problem (for most citizens, at least).
Using zombies was also fun, the report’s authors write. By allowing the trainees’ imaginations to run wild, the instructors were able to teach them about the basics of writing military plans and orders, they wrote.
“If you suspend reality for a few minutes, this type of training scenario can actually take a very dry, monotonous topic and turn it into something rather enjoyable,” they wrote in a disclaimer to the report.
fyi, the zombies are a dehumanization of WE THE PEOPLE.. that’s what they always do, dehumanize the enemy!
in vietnam they called the enemy gook/gooks
in iraq/afghanistan they called the enemy haji/hajis
anything to distract from the fact that they are HUMAN BEINGS! hence zombies! the new enemy! aka WE THE PEOPLE!