World War Z/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

** "If this is a "publicity battle" then why are the military units under supplied?" Because the military wasn't planning on their troops having to do anything other than mop up survivors. This isn't the first time a military has underestimated how the tide of battle would turn and paid for it. Read the chapter again; the plan was that the zombies would be almost completely destroyed by artillery, with the troops on the ground only having to mop up stragglers. From that perspective the troops on the ground had enough ammo forwhat they were intended to do, why give them all the ammo in "an insanely large area" when they wouldn't use it while other fronts could need it? Again, the military plan was to kill most zombies long before they got within firing range of the troops, so pretty much everything that bugs the OT is accounted for. "Men in trenches?" Vast overstatement of what actually happened. "Barbed wire and deep pits?" Overconfidence, they planned on the zombies being eliminated from long range. The "insane troll logic" idea that zombies would suffer less damage from a MLRS barrage when clustered together? Conviential weapons are designed to kill through shock, blood loss, concussive force, etc. etc. Zombies can only be killed by brain damage. The problem was that while plenty of zombies were killed in the barrages, there were plenty more who only suffered damage to their limbs or torsos, which at most reduced them to crawling. With all the zombies packed so tightly it also meant that each zombie effectively acted as a shield for the one behind it. And finally, they were fighting the entire zombified population of New York, several million zombies in fact, and they had to stop the great panic by showing they had the situation under control. So in short, overconfidence in the effectiveness of their artillery, a need to show the world (which at this point is in a state of near-complete anarchy and terror) that they could control the situation, and a lack of understanding how zombies work combined with the fact that everything they had and trained for was dealing with human enemies.

*** Except that no remotely believable or competent military ever operates on the basis of 'We will only bring exactly as much as we need if everything goes exactly according to plan, and won't have anything in reserve in case there are setbacks'. The '''first''' thing anybody in uniform learns is that the first casualty of any battle is, inevitably, the battle plan. Nothing has ever or will ever go according exactly to plan. Something always fucks up, there's always something about the enemy you didn't know, there's always something you had to improvise. ALWAYS. This is not obscure knowledge. Officers know this, enlisted men know this, recruits just out of boot camp know this.... shit, even second lieutenants, by far the least intelligent form of life in any military organization, all know this. You could not find ''any'' article of faith more universally or deeply believed among military personnel than Murphy's Law, not even the Law of Gravitation. So explaining a given series of events in a book as 'The military assumed everything would go right and so they didn't bring any reserves' only highlights that the author knows nothing, '''absolutely nothing''', about how military people actually think, plan, or move.

** This was in the middle of America's Biggest City, which they were hoping to eventually re-take without destroying it in the process. They didn't want to devastate the city if they didn't have to, hence why they held off on using air bombs (such as the Fuel Air Bomb at the end of the Yonkers chapter) until the battle was essentially lost.

*** In the real world the only real reason the military will hestitate to blow up buildings full of enemies is if innocent bystanders are also living in them. ''Occasionally'' an exception is made if something is some kind of World Heritage monument, but the Battle of Monte Cassino during the invasion of Sicily can testify that even that much forbearance is situational. If the city is full of a giant chain swarm of zombies then they don't have that problem -- every human being in the zone is already dead and Z'ed. So blow it to hell and rebuild it later. Bombs are cheaper than people. Buildings are cheaper than people. ''Everything'' is cheaper than people. Plus, the property is of absolutely zero value to anyone anyway if its got a million zombies squatting on it, and military planners are intimately familiar with the term "sunk cost"... especially since they didn't pay to build the buildings in the first place, and won't pay to rebuild them after blowing them up. (Why do you think ''every'' major property insurance policy in the world specifies 'not liable for acts of war or acts of God', anyhoo?)