Pentagon Planners Wargame Really, Really Bad Day

[The Straight Story]

Pentagon Planners Wargame Really, Really Bad Day

When the U.S. military dreams up a worst-case scenario, it doesn't think small. This week, USA Today reports, U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command are conducting a training exercise involving the following simultaneous situations:

* A "dirty bomb" attack on Windsor, Ontario, near Detroit, killing more than 5,000 Canadians.
* Terrorist attacks in Detroit itself involving explosions of railcars containing chlorine and phosgene gas in which nearly 13,000 people die, 85,000 are hurt, and 3.5 million are forced to evacuate.
* The hijacking of an American airliner, which is later shot down by Canadian fighter jets, killing more than 100 passengers and crew members.
* A release of plague bacteria in Mexico City, killinf almost 8,00 people and sending thousands more across the U.S.-Mexican border.
* A bird-flu outbreak in the United States.
* A Category 3 hurricane hits New Orleans again.

"When they have an exercise here, America's having a bad day," said Ronald Eller, the Army Corps of Engineers' representative at NorthCom. "They come up with a lot of Armageddon."

http://www.govexec.com/fedblog/#1649

usa today article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-15-sentry-terror_x.htm?csp=34

[MindPilot]

1. Here's a really bad scenario for you to work with:

January 20th, 2009: Jeb Bush inaugurated, tens of millions of angry Americans riot. Federal offices all over the country destroyed, Washington police and Secret Service overwhelmed as citizens occupy the White House and Capitol Building. US military personnel refuse orders to intervene.

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. Pentagon planners? They have planners?

[Why Syzygy]

3. Yeah. they were having an exercise

on 911 too. What to do about low flying aircraft. I think they failed that exam.

Sounds like Mexico and Canada aren't having a terrific day either, in "their" scenario. hummm

ps .. A bird flu "outbreak"? What does that mean? Mad Cow Disease?

At the same time, a bird flu pandemic appears extraordinarily unlikely. First, a pandemic would require the worrisome H5N1 strain to mutate significantly. Currently H5N1 is not transmissible from person to person. A bird can transmit the disease to another bird, and a person who is in close contact with an infected bird can catch it from the bird, but an infected person cannot transmit the disease to another person. Since the overwhelming majority of the global population never comes into close physical contact with birds, the existing H5N1 strain poses almost no threat—as evidenced by the low fatality numbers thus far. If bird flu mutated in a way that allowed person-to-person transmission, this would be very dangerous. But the odds of such a mutation appear low, as explained in depth here.

http://www.slate.com/id/2141277/

[phoebe]

4. fear, fear, fear - it's all they know. This is a none too subtle way of

saying that Canada and Mexico are in the loop with the goals of the US.

[TrogL]

5. Why in the world are they dragging Canada into this?

Twice!!

[gratuitous]

6. As I recall, they war gamed Iraq, too

And when the numbers didn't work out right (that is, they used too small a force), they just fudged the results so that Rumsfeld could go in lean and mean, like he wanted to.

What's the point of planning if, as soon as the shit hits the fan, you throw all the plans out the window in the name of political expediency anyway?