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Season 2 of “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” wraps on Apple TV+ on May 1, and the show will spend ten episodes doing what Pentagon strategic planners have presumably never done: war-gaming a Kaiju event.
The series is built around a covert government agency monitoring giant monsters called Titans. It stars father and son Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell as different-era versions of the same Army officer — a soldier’s soldier who spends decades watching the brass refuse to take a threat seriously until it’s too late.
The story is fiction, obviously. But as anyone who’s sat through a joint readiness exercise knows, the scariest scenario is always the one nobody planned for. So, let’s run the tape.
The first problem is command authority. Under the current National Response Framework, a catastrophic domestic incident triggers a cascade of federal coordination flowing from local authorities up through FEMA, with the Defense Department stepping in for Defense Support of Civil Authorities. It’s a system built for hurricanes, mass casualty events and CBRN -chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear- incidents.
A 300-foot amphibious creature leveling a coastal city technically checks the “catastrophic” box. Still, the chain of command for a threat that moves under its own power, does not respond to law enforcement, and cannot be detained pending arraignment is untested at best.
In a real monster scenario, U.S. Northern Command would likely assume the lead for any domestic Titan event. The command has been quietly expanding its homeland defense footprint, with new component activations as recently as this past January. That’s encouraging, unless the thing you’re defending against walked right out of the ocean and into downtown Los Angeles. At that point, the question of what active-duty troops are actually authorized to do on U.S. soil becomes considerably more urgent.
The second problem is weapons. The U.S. military’s most powerful non-nuclear conventional munition is the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bunker-buster delivered exclusively by B-2 Spirit bombers. It can punch through roughly 200 feet of reinforced concrete before detonating. According to Scientific American, the weapon saw its first real-world combat use last year against hardened nuclear facilities in Iran.
The GBU-57 is, by any reasonable measure, an extraordinary piece of engineering. It is also a weapon designed to destroy static targets. A Titan-class threat that can absorb a fuel-air explosion and keep moving rewrites the targeting calculus entirely. Missiles, artillery, carrier air wings: all work against a threat that can be fixed, tracked, and killed inside a standard engagement envelope. A creature that is in the bunker presents a problem that the current inventory was not designed to solve.
The third problem is the kill chain. Even if you could hurt the brute, authorizing the strike would be a bureaucratic event horizon.
Nuclear release authority is well-defined. Authority to conduct a sustained kinetic campaign against a living organism the size of a skyscraper in a populated coastal city would involve rules of engagement, collateral damage estimates, environmental review, and at least one congressional staffer asking if the move requires an Authorization for Use of Military Force.
Pick your favorite bottleneck.
The “Monarch” universe eventually arrives at the uncomfortable conclusion that the military is not the main effort: Containment is. The joint force is extraordinary at destroying thingsbut it is considerably less adept at managing them.
The season finale drops May 1 on Apple TV+.
So is the U.S. military prepared to fight a Kaiju? The answer is a firm “probably not” – but they’re going to try anyway.
