It’s well known that the Pentagon develops contingency plans for highly unlikely events such as war with Canada or an alien invasion. What I’m wondering is whether the US military has an actual written plan for dealing with a zombie apocalypse. Is there any way to find out for sure? And, if so, is it possible to obtain a copy of it? It would make for interesting reading.
As you suggest, they probably have a plan for alien invasion. How are zombies really different from aliens?
At the planning level, all you care about are the capabilities and probable intentions of your adversary. And ultimately your responses are driven by your tactics, training and equipment. IOW, the Army knows how to surround, blast, and occupy. The Air Force knows how to locate & bomb.
Whether the enemy arrived from orbit, the graveyard, or a fissure in the earth, the DOD response is going to be pretty similar. How well that will work depends on the enemy capabilities. What exactly are zombie’s strong & weak points? What tactics do they use?
I also think we’ve done this topic before. We’ve certanly discussed zombies a bunch. You might try searching, both with our built-in search & Google.
It’s not so much what they’d do which I’m curious about, but whether or not they actually have a plan for dealing with something which is, to the best of our knowledge, entirely fictitious. Did some shadowy arm of the Pentagon spend millions sequestering scientists and theologians to develop a military response to an attack by the undead? And, if so, would they admit it?
I’d suggest the answers are “no” and “hell, no,” respectively. The Pentagon may very well plan for invading every other country on the face of the Earth, because you can just never know which way the geopolitical winds might blow, but for something so absurd and incredibly unlikely as a zombie invasion, I suspect the general or admiral who considered authorizing such a plan would be concerned about what would happen to his career if word of it leaked (as it surely would). No top officer wants to be the laughingstock of Fort Fumble, or grilled on Capitol Hill for wasting taxpayers’ money.
The difference is between “highly unlikely” and “entirely fictous”. We can imagine an unlikely, but not impossible, scenario where Canada would attack the US. We can also imagine a very highly unlikely, but not impossible, scenario of unfriendly aliens landing, since there also active programs to try and find them. (Although I rate our chances against any civilsation that has developed better space travel than us slimmer than stone-age people against nuclear rockets. However, I also have a hard time imganing any species rising farther than us without overcoming needless aggression, because humans are so close to extinction through stupidity; if we could cooperate, we would be farther. Initially peaceful aliens might be provoked into attack by the aggressive behaviour of Earthlings, however.)
But we can’t imagine people rising from the dead like zombies, because that would be impossible from what we know about biological laws.
Bah. The Army doesn’t have to do any planning. All it would take is a couple of cases of beer, a couple of cases of Mountain Dew, chips, a few geeks and a tape recorder. One weekend and they’d have a complete set of plans, with subsections based on what type of zombie and other variables. Hell, they could just read here and get a pretty good outline.
The difference between aliens and zombies is that one is a very easy to predict reality while the other is pure fantasy. You might as well be asking about hobbit attacks or godzilla attacks.
As far as pentagon plans for aliens, Id like to see a real cite about this. I have read that there are first contact protocols written, but I doubt they are binding or even detailed past some basics like quarantine, negotiation, etc.
As far as a war with Canada, why shouldnt we have plans for this? A victorious military is a prepared military. Tomorrow the PM of Canada could side with an enemy and we’re better off knowing their strategic sites now than later. Every good intelligence outfit has detailed plans on its allies. Look at Iran today compared to the Shah or drug lord controlled parts of Mexico. Its always good to know your friends.
What about Canadian zombies?
Are we prepared to deal with handsome young vampires stalking America’s teenage girls?
Perhaps funding could be set aside to deal with the Blair Witch.
And maybe the government over here in Britain could publish health & safety guidelines on what to do if one met one of the many “Black Dogs”.
What, did the corporations let Parliament off its leash again? 
It’s not the handsome young vampires you need to be afraid of; it’s the old and scary ones. 
The DoD’sJoint Staff has planning responsibilities. J7, J5, and J3 all have a hand in it.
From what I know, I’m willing to bet the SDMB there isn’t a zombie plan. I’m sure someone somewhere has contemplated a “first contact” plan, but my guess is they just consider that a scenario along the lines of preparation for natural disasters/homeland security/civil disturbance incidents.
As for the “the Pentagon plans for war in every country,” that’s a popular myth. Contingency planning goes stale very quickly. Political, social, economic, geographic, pretty much everything about a country and region is changing rapidly. Hell, just try keeping up with road atlases (if even available). Keeping up with those changes is a manpower-intensive job, and resources are scarce, so the only plans that are likely kept up-to-date are the ones you’d all expect (China, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Al Qaeda’s operating bases, etc.).
Now, that doesn’t mean that those plans are *any good *, RE: the invasion of Iraq. The on-the-shelf plan for that from the 1990s was changed, however.
A similar situation occurred during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. “Desert Shield” was a (major) modification of existing plans to deploy to counter a Soviet threat to Saudi Arabia.
Of course, someone somewhere sometime probably considered some bizarre scenarios, especially during the Cold War. I’d imagine that the Pentagon looked at things like interventions to stop communist revolutions in places off-the-beaten path. Probably not an invasion of Canada, but maybe Italy, Greece, Thailand, etc. Trouble is, those plans are all obsolete-- the countries are different, the threats are different, our capabilities are different-- and thus of historical interest only (if they ever get unclassified, which is rare, because it never looks good for it to be known that the U.S. once considered invading your country :).
BTW, no discussion of this topic can be complete without a link to the color-coded war plans which is usually the source for the “U.S. plans for everything” myth.
The DoD may well have made some sort of plan for dealing with an infectious pandemic which makes its victims aggressive and functional, and that seems like a decent approximation of a zombie attack to me.
*Trouble is, those plans are all obsolete-- the countries are different, the *
Things like the location of major roads, permanent military bases, naval docks, etc dont change that often, but yes I agree that this is more popular myth than anything else.
I’m surprised the thread has come this far without a mention of Max Brooks, author of “World War Z” and “The Zombie Survival Guide”. The first of those books is particularly relevant, telling (in faux-documentary style) how useless the modern military is against zombies and how eventually some useful tactics evolved. Basically, zombies could survive anything that didn’t destroy the head, so all those explosives in our current arsenal were pretty useless, since shrapnel and concussion just slowed down the zombies a bit. The re-tooled army won with 18th-century firing line tactics, and lots of cheap rifles instead of high tech precision gadgetry.
Any chance Max Brooks was really hired as a Pentagon consultant?
World War Z is a damn good book, by the way.
The US military is also powerless against Godzilla.
Agreed (though iI think it would be more Homeland Security & the CDC’s province). The hardest part would be actually convincing the general public that grandma isn’t sick or deranged, she’s dead and she needs a bullet to her brain, not medical treatment. There’s a very good book called Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead by Jonathan Maberry.
Here’s a SDSAB report on the same subject: Did the U.S. plan an invasion of Canada in the 1920s? - The Straight Dope
I hoped nobody would…
Besides which, a South African called Abraham du Toit had a solution decades before Brooks published his books.
People on other boards have pointed out that modern military weapons would actually reduce zombies to undead hamburger, however. Hamburger that’s on fire.
As for war plans going out of date, my mother was a secretary for the CIA back in the 50’s when they were in an old skating rink in DC, writing up reports and assessment from the field guys. On sector she had was Afghanistan, back when the CIA was in there, and the HUMINT was still fresh, and I think we helped build a lot of those cave systems. When the USSR invaded in 1979, she seriously was considering a request to go back since she had knowledge of those areas. Five kids, the oldest just in college, kept her in SC.