The Pentagon Has an Actual Plan to Fight Zombies

The U.S. Government is prepared for a zombie apocalypse.

For pop-culture lovers, the flooding of zombie movies and television series is nothing but an ominous development.

People have been experiencing social unrest — be it in the form of getting uprooted from their homes due to war or due to climate catastrophe.

In past years people have been fighting the covid related eviction, but the U.S government started planning ahead for something worse in 2011, which is fighting off the infectious disease carrier.

Zombies, the ones who turn people into objects of terror, are tied into a complicated history — it is linked to slavery and colonialism.

Let’s take a quick dive into the interesting subject:

The Development of CONOP 8888 Plan

Instead of being flesh-eating cannibals, zombies were slaves of Voodoo priests; the legends detail how they emerged during the American occupation of Haiti in the early 20th century.

Something similar was captured in the first-ever Hollywood-length zombie film of 1932, “White Zombie,” where a Haitian Voodoo enslaved the girl, turning her into the object of his will.

The Haitian context is one of the reasons why the U.S government actually went ahead in developing an official plan for the Zombie attack. The preparedness plan is known as the CONOP 8888.

The junior military officers inked the official document in April 2011 at U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM).

They thought of the fictional scenario to come up with the training exercise and invasion contingency plan. Despite visualizing the fiction, people preparing the CONOP 8888 clarified that the program was not designed as a joke.

The plan hints toward the martial law scenario and further states:

U.S. and international law regulate military operations only insofar as human and animal life are concerned. There are almost no restrictions on hostile actions… against pathogenic life forms, organic-robotic entities, or ‘traditional’ zombies.

Zombies Classification System

The plan proposed takes different classifications of zombies into account. The zombies are divided into eight categories: the run of the mill, evil magic, pathogenic, radiation, weaponized, vegetarian, space, and chicken zombies.

Run of the mill is thought to be those undead creatures formed through bacteria and air pathogens, while a mystic source creates the evil magic zombies.

The vegetarian zombies eat herbaceous foods. Out of all these categories, only one is based on reality — the chicken zombies. It is the only class out of all to actually exist.

Such zombies originated in a 2006 incident in Petaluma, California, where a failed poultry euthanizing resulted in haunted hens.

The hens were euthanized with carbon monoxide, which caused haunted hens to crawl out of piles and walk around until they, too, finally died of organ failure.

Even though the experts did not seem to find reality in the type of categories, but despite that, they seem deadly serious about all of them.

The Details of the Invasion Contingency Plan

According to various sources, this is what the plan’s introduction looks like:

Zombies are terribly dangerous to all human life, and zombie infections have the potential to seriously undermine national security and economic activities that sustain our way of life. Therefore having a population that is not composed of zombies or at risk from their malign influence is vital to U.S. and Allied National Interests.

Now, CONPLAN 8888–11 is a 31-page strategy divided into three parts. The first part deals with creating a defensive plan for protecting humanity, the second deals with establishing methods of eradicating zombie threats, and the third deals with restoring the law and order of the country.

The plan further details the general awareness training where the other countries will be warned.

Next, the Pentagon will recall all the military personnel to service for establishing defensive positions.

It will launch limited-scale military operations initially to negate the zombie threat. They will then follow a dominating strategy by locking down all military installations for 30 days while equipped with appropriate protective gear.

The orders of killing all non-human life on sight and bombing zombie infection sources will be issued.

After this comes the stabilization phase, where the safety of the environment and protection of surviving civilians will be the priority of the plan — the military would shift its effort from attacking the zombies to restoring the civilians into everyday life.

Is the Plan Perfect?

The summary of CONOP 8888’s states:

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.

Interestingly, the professor of Tuft University, Daniel W. Drezner, had written Theories of International Politics and Zombies and also read the Pentagon’s plan against zombies.

After reading the document, he found some serious problems with the overall strategy and the zombie categorization system.

The program agrees on the need to counter zombie operations but the problem is that “USSTRATCOM forces” do not possess sufficient contingency stores (food and water) for supporting the outbreak for even 30 days.

Interestingly, CDC capitalized on the zombie craze and in 2018 released several materials for zombie pandemic online — for instance, entertaining blogs and graphic novels carrying details of preparedness tips.

The campaign goes like, “Never Fear — CDC is Ready.” which definitely is not easy to digest amid the covid era especially, as all these slogans now merely seem huge promises.

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