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Pentagon Document Lays Out Battle Plan Against Zombies
mpicpp sends this news from CNN: "Never fear the night of the living dead — the Pentagon has got you covered. From responses to natural disasters to a catastrophic attack on the homeland, the U.S. military has a plan of action ready to go if either incident occurs. It has also devised an elaborate plan should a zombie apocalypse befall the country, according to a Defense Department document obtained by CNN. In an unclassified document titled 'CONOP 8888,' officials from U.S. Strategic Command used the specter of a planet-wide attack by the walking dead as a training template for how to plan for real-life, large-scale operations, emergencies and catastrophes."
From the document, it says for this training excersize, "we elected to use a completely impossible scenarios that could never be mistaken as a 'real plan'.
"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,"
Zombies are a metaphor for poor people. You can't make a battle plan for what to do when the proletariat rises, because the optics are bad, but you can plan for zombies. Yet another reason to do something about income inequality before it comes to that.
Emergency services have been using things like "zombie attacks" for decades. There's a lot of reasons why. One is if a civilian stumbles onto your training exercise, they're more likely to think it's some sort of movie then to get scared. Another is it's a bit lighthearted for a serious subject and may make it more enjoyable for people involved. And, any skills or experienced from the fantasy directly carries over to real life situations.
Now all the global telecommunication depends on satellites
Actually it doesn't. Maybe it did in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, but at about the turn of the millennium satellite communication is increasingly unimportant for global communications. In fact it has the disadvantages of much higher latency, lower bandwidth, and much higher cost.
I always thought it was the Federal Government that was made up of zombies. After all, the do desperately need brains.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Not only that but zombies combine multiple situations. You need physical defense, infection monitoring, unknown medical care, rioting, panic, etc
You can combine all your forces. Police ambulance fire military into a single exercise easily.
And it is easier for the actor to play their roles.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Both funny, and sadly, insightful.
First off: training, as others have said. Ridiculous scenarios have the advantage of being more entertaining and less likely to freak out the populace.
And secondly, if you'll allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment, I imagine the response to a worldwide zombie attack would bear many similarities to the response to mass civilian uprisings - a scenario any power-loving government is afraid of. And can you imagine the reactions if it got out that they had a plan titled "Military response to attempted popular revolution"?
Not to mention that you don't want to encourage the god-and-country loving rank and file to think about how they would react to being ordered to fire on their neighbors - in a crisis situation you can put a lot of psychological pressure on the troops and possibly get at least a few days or weeks of unhappy obedience before you have to start worrying about mass defections, which used intelligently may be enough to get the population back in line. Put them through a training exercise where they have to confront the possibility of being used for civilian oppression beforehand though, and you may find that a lot of them have already decided they'll have no part in it if the scenario becomes reality.
And it has the added benefit that anyone claiming that "zombie apocalypse" is a stand-in for "civilian uprising" will sound like they're off their rocker. And so if you'll excuse me I'm going to remove my tinfoil hat and get on with enjying this beautiful Saturday morning.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Zombie attack is used as great training because it combines many different types of scenarios into one. It's an infectious disease, so you're training mass prophylaxis etc, people get injured, so it covers mass casualties like a plane crash or big explosion, the zombies come after people in mass like a riot or invasion. The water is assumed to be infected with the zombie virus, so it trains infrastructure disaster, etc. Nearly everybody involved with emergency response has to do their job for a zombie scenario, so it's great for a large, coordinated training exercise.
The last time we ran zombies, here in College Station, I don't know that the computer emergency response people were included. That's the only group not trained by zombie that I can think of. Maybe next time we'lldo zombie hackers. :)
I work at TEEX in College Station, where we train all sorts of peoplefor every disaster imaginable - we have wrecked trains, buildings that collapse on demand, etc. Most of the classes we offer can probably be included in a zombie scenario .
I hang around in survivalists circles a little bit and there's a little bit of a saying there "If you can survive a zombie apocalypse you can survive almost anything" The idea of walking undead creatures with a taste for human flesh is very unlikely (not impossible, but unlikely), but the skills & tools for surviving one will prepare you for a variety of situations (natural disaster, civil unrest, economic collapse, etc). The idea of the military preparing for mass numbers of "zombies" (civilians) rising up and assaulting them is not very settling. There are not many situations in which this kind of training would be necessary except for a civilian uprising, save for some of the aspects of dealing with an defending from assault with limited resources, a breakdown of communications & no backup.
that plan actually covers the uprising of large parts of the population against the government.