Gordon Lubold at Foreign Policy revealed this week that the Department of Defense has contingency plans in place for a variety of potential zombie apocalypses.
Foreign Policy obtained a document entitled "CONOP 8888," also known as "Counter-Zombie Dominance," off the Department of Defense's public servers. It contains plans to deal with, among other threats, "chicken zombies," "vegetarian zombies," and "evil magic zombies."
Of all the zombies discussed, the plan notes, only the "chicken zombies" or "CZ" actually exist. Hens that are no longer able to lay eggs are frequently euthanized using carbon monoxide and then buried. If done incorrectly, the hens are not entirely dead when buried, and claw their way back into the light.
"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," according to its executive summary.
"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."
Even though the document, dated April 30, 2011, contains a disclaimer indicating that its contents are "not actually designed as a joke," its contents are not entirely serious either. CONOP 8888 was designed in 2009 and 2010 as a creative way of preparing officers and officer trainees to protect citizens in the event of an otherwise inexplicable attack.
"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 of CONOP 8888 wrote. "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."
[Image via Walking Dead Facebook page]
