The Pentagon isn't letting a little thing like zombies not existing get in the way of their emergency preparedness. The US military has cooked up a plan that would come in handy if the dead happened to rise from their graves to attack the living.
"This plan was not actually designed as a joke," reads a disclaimer in the recently declassified CONOP 8888, the "Counter-Zombie Dominance" plan devised by US Strategic Command planners in Omaha, Nebraska. But it's not entirely serious, either.
The plan was designed as a training tool for military personnel who would be tasked with assessing threats and protecting civilians in any sort of attack. The military doesn't actually believe that zombies are a legitimate threat—just that they're a useful training tool.
So why zombies? Well, for one thing, because it's fun and gets the trainees thinking. The document itself is kind of a hoot, even listing the variants of zombies the trainees might encounter: pathogenic zombies, radiation zombies, space zombies, evil magic zombies, vegetarian zombies, and, for some reason, chicken zombies. Apparently, using a ridiculous idea like zombies proved an effective way to teach personnel the various concepts they need to know in the event of an attack.
The other reason is also explained in the document:
Planners who attended JPME II at the Joint Combined Warfighting School also 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. Rather than risk such an outcome by teaching our augmentees using the fictional "Tunisia" or "Nigeria" scenarios used at JCWS, we elected to use a completely-impossible scenario that could never be mistaken as a real plan.
Of course, if zombies were to rise, they'd be terribly offended by this plan.
[via Foreign Policy]