In 2011 a plan drafted by the U.S. Government called CONPLAN 8888-11, “Counter-Zombie Dominance” was revealed to the public. The document details a strategy to defend against a zombie attack. And, yes, it’s real.
Dating from April 2011, CONOP 8888 is the work of military planners of the U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) in Omaha, Neb. One of the Department of Defense’s ten unified commands, USSTRATCOM employs personnel from all branches of the military in order to provide a number of large-scale national defense services.
And this is the organization that created an honest-to-goodness zombie defense plan.
CONOP 8888 — made public thanks to a report by Foreign Policy in 2014 — serves as an outline of what would have to be done in the event that the sort of zombie apocalypse depicted in shows like The Walking Dead happens in real life. More specifically, the document provides detailed explanations of the various legal, political, and practical issues involved in a war on the undead.
“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,” the report reads.
Combined with the fact that the authors expect a declaration of martial law following an outbreak, that gives the government a wide range of options for killing zombies.
In discussing how to kill zombies, the plan goes through a number of general phases that would make for the best anti-zombie attack. In the first phase, authorities will instruct the military and the public on how the zombies they’re fighting work and how to kill them. The second phase, “deterrence,” points out that “zombies cannot be deterred themselves,” but calls for a broad sweep of operations to restore confidence in the government’s ability to combat the threat.
During the summers of 2009 and 2010, while training augmentees from a local training squadron about JOPP, members of the USSTRATCOM component found out (by accident) that the hyperbole involved in writing a ‘zombie survival plan’ actually provided a very useful and effective training tool.”
Basically, planners realized that disruptive political fallout could ensue if they were to train using specific named enemies. By using zombies as the enemies, planners avoided the risk of the public assuming there was a real current threat, but more importantly they opened a new level of thinking—the fictional nature allowed planners to break out of their old mindsets.