Every spring, the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky runs a policy simulation designed to illustrate the difficulty of operating an organization in the context of asymmetric and limited information, and every fall Professor Robert Farley runs his own two-hour mini-simulation to give students a sense of how the larger simulation will play out:
In my first year, I did zombies; the year after was the aftermath of Independence Day, and last year I asked our 35 first-year graduate students to develop a strategy for containing or killing Godzilla.
This year it was vampires:
Each group was tasked with developing an organizational response to the imminent public declaration of the existence of vampires. I gave each group a few general questions, then set them lose.CIA and DoD each received a bit of additional information. CIA had been aware of the existence of vampires essentially from the point of its founding, as had most major foreign intelligence organizations. The CIA even employed vampiric agents from time to time; a CIA vampire killed Salvador Allende.
DoD’s relationship was even longer and more extensive. In its previous incarnations as the Departments of War and Navy, the US military had employed vampires since the Civil War. In World War II, an entire brigade sized unit was created, although it was mainly concerned with responding to the activities of German and Japanese vampires. I also indicated that many analysts believed that Osama Bin Laden was a vampire, and that Al Qaeda seemed comfortable with the use of vampiric agents.
Here’s what his Department of Justice group came up with:
- Prioritize vampire-specific policies. When crafting initial vampire policy, reducing risk to humans must take precedence over the granting of equal protection to vampires.
- Define vampire’s legal status. If the President desires full vampire inclusion in the human population, they must be granted equal protection under the law.
- Review U.S. laws to make them species neutral, as far as possible.
- Strengthen criminal statutes that address crimes likely to be associated with vampire behavior, including feeding and conversion. Also, create human-on-vampire hate crimes.
- Amnesty for past crimes and legal food supply based on self-identification within a specified time frame.
- Create and fund a new interagency entity headed by the Department of Justice to deal with vampire registration, identification and criminal enforcement, and distribution of vampire food.
- Liaise with Interpol regarding transnational vampire threats.