Did You Know: The U.S. government has an official zombie apocalypse plan — and it’s not a joke!

The United States Department of Defense quietly developed a detailed plan in 2011 to counter a hypothetical zombie apocalypse, and the first line of the official document explicitly states, “This plan was not actually designed as a joke.”

If you think ‘The Walking Dead’ is just fiction, you need to rethink because the US government took the zombie showdown seriously and invested a lot of money and research into it.

The unusual strategy, titled CONPLAN 8888-11 “Counter-Zombie Dominance,” is a 31-page unclassified contingency plan created by the U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) as part of military training but captures the bizarre intersection of pop culture and real-world planning.

How It Came About — Training, Not Fear

CONPLAN 8888 was drafted between 2009 and 2010 by military planners undergoing instruction on the Joint Operational Planning and Execution System (JOPES), the formal system the U.S. uses to prepare for real emergencies. Rather than use real countries or crises in training scenarios, which could lead to political discomfort or misinterpretation, officers elected to use an impossible threat that could never be mistaken as a genuine plan: zombies.

The plan’s authors noted that the zombie scenario provided a useful and effective training exercise because it allowed planners to explore the full scope of contingency planning concepts without political fallout. By choosing something patently fictional, they ensured the scenario remained pure training, free of diplomatic implications.

Despite the seemingly humorous premise, the Pentagon’s Zombie Plan is structured like a legitimate strategic document, with sections on defensive and offensive operations, threat classifications and mission objectives.

What the Plan Covers

The Zombie Plan outlines broad strategies for monitoring, containing and, if necessary, eradicating a worldwide zombie outbreak that threatens “non-zombie” humans. According to the plan’s summary, mentioned by Wikisources, the objectives include:

• Establishing and maintaining a defensive posture to protect humanity from undead attacks.
• Conducting systematic operations to neutralise zombie threats.
• Assisting civil authorities in maintaining law, order and essential services during and after an outbreak.

Interestingly, the document even categorises multiple types of zombies, ranging from traditional pathogenic undead to “radiation zombies,” “evil magic zombies” and even “space zombies”, to test planners’ ability to adapt strategies to unpredictable threats.