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* The battle at Yonkers. Not about the planning, or that the US military fouled up so badly, but nobody in the tanks thought of the obvious: [[Car Fu|RUN THE ZOMBIES OVER]]? A ''helicopter'' tried to mow them down with his propellers, what where the guys in the tanks doing?
** I think the main point about that sequence was that the army was so tied to doctrine that when everything that they had been trained, or ordered, to do failed, they panicked. Unless tank crews are routinely trained to run over people (and I suspect they are not, not even Chinese ones), it probably wouldn't occur to them.
*** Which is a Straw Military trope in that it gives the troops no capacity for independent thought. In real life, armies are composed of people who have an intimate, visceral awareness that if they fuck up their jobs during a firefight ''then they are going home in a bag''. This tends to spur a strong tendency away from blatantly contra-survival actions, such as 'continuing to repeat a plan after seeing it already fail'. In real life, military training also emphasizes that the primary purpose of doctrine is to better enable coordinated action by ensuring that everyone knows at least generally what everyone else will be doing in response to a given situation, ''not'' to be used as a substitute for rational thought. One of the qualities they look for in combat leaders is the ability to take initiative and make decisions when confronted with a situation not covered by orders, and I'm not talking about generals here, I'm talking about ''corporals''.
** Judging by the number of zombies, there were not enough tanks present to run them over before they all get get stuck on the bodies of several hundred zombies or run out of fuel. I m sure some tanks did try though(this troper works in a armored regiment and can attest that it is the dream of most tankers to run people over, but driving straight through a zombie invasion of millions is a very bad idea).
** I think the tanks were also generally placed in "dug-in" fortifications, like larger fox holes, that made it more difficult for them to simply start driving over a bunch of zombies. Not to mention that the roads ahead aren't described as being clear - a tank could potentially get stuck amidst zombie corpses and wrecked cars, and then require rescue.
*** The assertion that tanks would 'get stuck' on zombies is risible. A modern MBT can go over any obstacle short of a reinforced concrete barricade, a dedicated tank trap, or an IED without impairment and often without even ''noticing''. There are Abrams crewmen who can testify that they have driven their tanks with ''entire trees'' stuck in the treads, and the only result was a fresh supply of toothpicks.
** A half mile worth of zombies is a lot of zombies.
*** Large groups of infantry clustered tightly together in the open makes the air support and artillery guys ''cream their jeans''.
** Brooks establishes that this wasn't just a "crowd" of zombies numbering in the tens of thousands, this was more like a deeply packed ''human wave'' extending for miles: even if the tanks could ran over that, they'd run out of gas before too long. But look at the Battle of Hope: so many zombies came that their corpses made a *wall* 20 feet high, new ones climbing over the fallen. And that was just a random area of New Mexico, not the 8 million strong, deeply-packed horde coming out of New York. Some of the scariest parts are when Brooks points out that zombie mega-swarms are a seething mass crawling over each other, literally like African driver ants.
*** So? This is exactly the situation that B-52s were invented for, if not tactical nuclear warheads. One good "arclight" bombing run can take an entire valley and obliterate everything in it, on down to ''removing all the topsoil from the ground'', in about five minutes. So, sure, 8 million zombies all in one place can maybe explain how a tank brigade loses. It doesn't explain how the Air Force loses. And yes, I know, they handcuffed the Pentagon to the Idiot Ball and had them go 'No, we won't actually use the Air Force'. That's the entire point of this complaint -- the military is losing because it refuses to use the proper tools for the job, and its refusing to do that only because the author is rooting for the zombies and arbitrarily de-braining anyone that might actually have options against them.
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** I got the impression that they thought their artillery would be a lot more effective than it actually was, so that the rocket launchers wouldn't need much ammunition to destroy the zombies while the tanks wouldn't need too many rounds to pick off the straggling groups. They apparently based this supposition on what would happen if regular humans came at a modern army massed like the zombies did, but failed to take into account the biological differences between zombies and humans.
*** I think it's more that they grossly under-estimated the number of zombies they would have to fight. They probably figured that they'd only have to kill a couple of thousand zombies to get their big PR victory, which is why they wasted their artillery (described as highly effective) on the more thinly spread-out initial waves of zombies. Nobody knew about how zombies could form "chain swarms" yet, and they suddenly found themselves swamped by millions of zombies.
**** Which is absolutely unbelievable idiocy, given that they can see way more than two thousand zombies coming at them just with their naked eyeballs from where they're standing. To be believable, in-character stupidity has to have some kind of limit. There's a difference between 'not being clever' and 'aiming the muzzle at your own face'.
** It also kind of never occurred to them up to that point that zombies are ''physically incapable'' of being afraid. Maybe they thought they had animal-level instinct, and would start tapering off or fleeing. More probably, they just didn't think about it. A human army facing that much artillery would get torn to shreds....but artillery is meant to churn up meat, not destroy a cranium. When was the last time that a full scale artillery barrage had to be sustained for over an hour? Even if the enemy has a lot of men, they'll get afraid and pause to regroup. If you face a million zombies, they'll charge head first directly at your guns even if 999,999 are dead, and the last one kills you. As for why no one even though to count how many anti-tank rounds they had? ....my only guesses are that 1 - they didn't take into account the obvious biological differences between humans and zombies. 2 - The Great Panic extended to the military command staff and they weren't thinking clearly; keep in mind that some major cities, particularly New York, had been overrun a matter of days before.
*** Artillery batteries are routinely expected to sustain fire for 1+ hours even in the modern battlefield environment. Sure, any one individual target tends to die pretty fast nowadays, but there are potentially a ''lot'' of individual infantry units calling that one artillery battery for support, so it spends all day shooting at multiple different targets. Indeed, the entire point of using artillery instead of airstrikes or drone strikes is because artillery is capable of sustained fire and not just 'show up, shoot a few times, fly back home to rearm'. The author really did not do the research here.
*** Also, re: the 'it never occurred to them that zombies are incapable of being afraid'... ''what kind of incredible morons are these people supposed to '''be?''''' They are already aware at this point that zombies are supposed to be mindless! 'Maybe they thought they would have animal instinct'. *groan* Maybe the author passed out the [[Idiot Ball]] like it was free Skittles day at the candy store.
** Keep in mind that the Battle of Yonkers took place three months after the Great Panic started. Considering the chaos we see in the "highway traffic jam" chapter, proper logistics was likely much more difficult (if not impossible) in that situation.
*** Several of the old Cold War contingency plans were drawn up to logistically supply a massive US army on either coast vs. a hypothetical large-scale Russian invasion ''after'' a limited nuclear exchange had already damaged the US economy and transport networks. For that matter, even a massive traffic jam on US interstate highways is infinitely superior traffic conditions to, oh, trying to sustain a large-scale transport effort through the Afghanistan mountains while the mountains are full of insurgents with RPGs and IEDs attacking your convoys, to name just one of the many feats the US military has managed in real life. The US military is the world's most efficient logistics engine on a scale that quite literally has to be seen to be even remotely believed. And in addition to all of the above, the continental United States has one of the world's most extensive railroad networks, none of which would be affected by traffic jams (as the combat engineers would cheerfully throw stranded cars right off the train tracks and into the ditch, if necessary), so moving large amounts of men and materiel around the US should be easily accomplishable no matter ''what'' the roads look like. The only thing that could interfere with this is an enemy intelligent enough to attack the railroads directly and destroy critical switching points or deliberately tear up lengths of track -- but we're fighting ''zombies'' here, so we don't have to worry about that.
** Here's a bigger question; if this was "a giant undead snake stretching back to Times Square", the entire NYC horde....why didn't they blow the bridges along the Harlem river, to take them on one chunk at a time? Not even at first, I mean when the army was getting overrun, didn't they pause to think "maybe we should blow the bridges, like in ''I Am Legend''?" Granted that zombies would just walk underwater to cross, but that takes time. How many were in the Bronx already? Probably wouldn't have saved the battle completely, but still.
*** Overconfidence. If they blow the bridges they have to rebuild them at some point, but they thought they could just lure the horde out and destroy it, then move in and mop up stragglers. Boom, a few months of clean up and NYC is ready to live in again. The leadership at the time just didn't want to admit that the situation really that bad, and by the time they did they either didn't have the resources in the area to blow up bridges or it wouldn't have made a difference.
**** 'Overconfidence' is not an unlimited excuse for insufficiently justified character stupidity. The [[Idiot Ball]] and [[Idiot Plot]] tropes exist for a reason.
**** Also, see below for the entry on just what the usual military attitude is towards property damage not involving unacceptable civilian casualties. (Short version: "Meh, its not ''our'' money we're blowing up.")
** I know he said Yonkers was mismanaged, but the fact the tanks had any anti-tank armaments AT ALL is pushing it to me. At the LEAST, there would be extra rounds of the "tank-shot gun" stuff and just a few DU rounds.
*** To be fair, the standard loadout for a tank's ready ammunition -- what it carries onboard at all times -- is something like 37 sabot and 3 beehive. The problem is that this would only come into play if the tanks had to roll out of the armory and down the road to shoot zombies on zero notice. Since this was a pre-planned operation, they had all the time necessary to re-load ammunition as necessary, and they don't let you graduate tank driver school as a private without the ability to understand that you load beehive for use against infantry, and sabot for use against enemy armor. So unless the tank crews were told to expect Russian tanks that day and got zombies instead, there is ''no excuse''.
* I don't get how this disease managed to get worldwide. It moved through human bites, and organ transplants, with a 24 hour incubation - but that still doesn't add up for me how this disease managed to get global.
** That's an simplification of it. You're neglecting the ignorance (nobody knew about it, ergo nobody knew to watch out for it) and denial (What, me, infected? You must be joking.)
*** Still not a sufficient explanation. After the infection manifests a blind man can't miss it, and during the 24-hour incubation period before expressing exactly how many people are going to be biting other people or having their organs transplanted?
** The fact the book says so little about how the outbreaks spread is at least somewhat justified. Whoever was on-scene at the start of an outbreak, and could've potentially told the narrator about the details, is either eaten or a zombie. It's a sampling bias in the sources' testimony that ensures we mostly hear about the aftermath.
** There was a period of at least a year where attempts to contain the zombie epidemic were a complete mess. China was trying to keep everything secret, and failing catastrophically. Thousands of refugees (either infected or with infected relatives) were fleeing into the Developed Countries due to rumors of a cure, and the Developed Nations (particularly the USA) were complacent about the outbreak due to the false security created by Phalanx. By the time it became clear that decisive action was necessary, it was already too late.
*** That sums it up very well: there's a period of over a year or more when people just deny that it exits, allowing it to spread in small numbers around the world - he said that in the USA they started in inner city slums, which is where illegal aliens would try to disappear, but over time even when people knew the bites were a fatal form of "rabies" or something, their survivor instinct kicked in, or people tried to save infected relatives. A major point is, would you honestly take out your own parents or children? That is, ''before'' it was well-known exactly what zombies were? Or even then, wouldn't you hope for a last minute cure? They only felt motivated to get off their asses and take costly "emergency measures" when it was obvious, but when its obvious is when its too late. Its a tacit criticism of that Hurricane Katrina thinking: "why didn't you give more funding to the dams earlier?" "The dams weren't obviously broken earlier" (even though hydro-engineering people working on the dams explicitly warned that they were going to break if something wasn't done).
**** In point of fact, the earthworks actually were funded adequately. The problem is that the money allocated wasn't actually spent on the levees but instead disappeared into various peoples' pockets on the way there. New Orleans has a rather infamous history of municipal corruption like that. The point relevant to this topic is that examples of gross corruption and stupidity can be believable -- on a 'happens in some places' level, and before an emergency appears. They are somewhat less believable as 'everybody is doing this. everybody, everywhere.' level and actually ''during'' the emergency.
* Why weren't body shots more effective? according to the [[wikipedia:Hydrostatic shock|Hydrostatic Shock Principle]], Zack could have his decomposing brain hemmoraged by a pressure wave from the chest shots the soldiers were going for, and with the [[M 855 A 1]] 5.56 NATO bullet the soldiers were using, the chances of that happening approach 1.
** The Solanum virus fundamentally changes how the brain works, so it's possible that said principle wouldn't apply to zombies, or may not be as severe as in humans.
*** The zombie brain is exactly as resistant to being physically smashed as the human brain, as is shown throughout the series. Sure, the neuro-chemistry is completely different from human but I'm not trying to give the damn thing psychoactive drug therapy, I'm trying to blow it the fuck up, smashy-smash.
** Brooks gets some of the physics of gun- and artillery-fire wrong, particularly in the Battle of Yonkers. .50 caliber machine guns shouldn't just go straight through zombies' bodies without really damaging them - they should be tearing them to pieces (a well-placed .50 caliber machine gun shot can tear you in half if hits you in the chest). There's some hand-waving in that zombies seem to be different on the inside, with their blood being replaced/changed into a strange, thick, dark substance that's compared to a gel.
*** Well, he also said that the ones blown literally in half were still a threat because it just made them a small target. Even if its a head attached to a neck, shoulder muscle, and arm, those body parts will keep trying to claw their way towards you. He calls it the "Scythe theory", and it didn't work. It slowed them down, but didn't immobilize them.
**** Any zombie rendered incapable of moving at walking speed is effectively mission-killed and is no longer a military threat. Sure, it'll bite your ankles if you come close to it while its flopping around down there, but if it doesn't have legs to chase you with then its stopped being a battlefield problem and can just lie there and groan until you've finished blowing up all its friends, and then you come back and finish it off. At worst its a sort of zombie land mine, and land mines have a very simple defense against them -- ''don't walk on the land mine''.
***** Plus, the major problem with land mines is that they're concealable. A shambler writhing around on the ground is anything but.
***** 'But it'll eventually drag itself over to you and kill you!' Sure... if I stand entirely still for fifteen minutes while simultaneously paying zero attention to my surroundings. HOW OFTEN DOES ANY SOLDIER FIGHTING IN A BATTLE ACTUALLY DO THIS?
* It is said that the soldiers and command had no experience dealing with zombies. So is this set in a world where no one has ever watched a movie about zombies? It assumes that once people have gotten over the initial skepticism of the existance of undead, [[Genre Savvy|no soldier would quickly make the logical connection that these are identical to the zombies in pop fiction]].
** There's a massive difference between having seen a movie and experiencing something yourself. We've all seen ''Die Hard'', but I imagine if you were in a real hostage situation you wouldn't suddenly turn into a badass because of your knowledge of genre conventions. The ''very real'' possibility of death or worse tends to massively override whatever you've seen on TV.
** Anyone with a little know-how can be a zombie fighter. That's a major point in every zombie work and Brooks even points it out in the Survival Guide.
** And as for soldiers (and police officers and anyone else trained to use a gun) every last minute of their training was based on shooting in the centre of mass. It's easy to say "just aim for the head," it's harder to ignore all those years of training telling you to aim for the torso.
*** Actually, its trivially easy to ignore 'all those years of training' so long as we're talking about ''aimed'' fire and not reflex snap shots -- which is what any headshot attempt on a zombie is going to be, unless we're talking 'the zombie just jumped out of the closet at you by surprise'. The entire point of "aiming", after all, is you making a conscious choice as to where you want to point your weapon. Training only 'locks you in' to a given course of action if you're operating by reflex.
* The Standard Infantry Rifle. Why would you dedicate the immense resources needed to produce and integrate a brand new semi-automatic 5.56 weapon system by the millions when you already have one?
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** "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?)
** Saying that the military is uneducated about fighting zombies is like saying the US navy in uneducated about fighting wooden frigates. Technically true but irrelevant since actual soldiers, or even actual insurgents are far, far tougher to kill. Over confidence is one thing, balls to the wall idiocy is another. An overconfident commander overextending himself and getting flanked is understandable. An overconfident tank commander getting his company blown up after entering a city without infantry support is understandable. A command capable of getting high tech equipment and air support failing to contain a group of shambling unintelligent enemies is populated with complete and utter idiots. Since when is the brain immune to concussive force from artillery? Food for thought: You know why infantrymen were issued helmets in WWI? Not to stop rifle bullets since they weren't strong enough to do so at regular combat ranges but to protect soldiers from artillery, since the head is the most likely part to get hit by shrapnel from air burst munitions. The zombies being tightly packed would make them vulnerable to artillery and bombs, plus it would allow more powerful weapons like 50 cals and 20mm cannons to take out multiple enemies with one bullet. And not you do not have to take out the head to neutralize the zombies, a zombies that has been expose to enough fire will simply fall apart. Plus, if the first rank of zombies falls, the next rank will have trouble going over them and so on until a literal wall of bodies have been formed.
*** As has been mentioned up-thread, they '''did''' take out a ton of zombies with the use of artillery and tank-fire. The problem was that there '''wasn't enough of it to destroy the following waves''' (due to supply issues, mostly likely coming from the fact that Yonkers happened in the middle of the Great Panic), which they didn't anticipate because they didn't know about "chain swarms". They were only expecting a couple thousand zombies, and instead half of zombified New York City ended up shambling after them.
*** But...the military had no experience in fighting zombies. It just...didn't. That point was made pretty clear in the book when the whole "shock and awe" show of force fell flat. Your whole explanation of how or why the zombies shouldn't have won flies in the face of, again, what happened in the book. The strikes took down a lot of zombies, more showed up. Brooks made a pretty big point about that - the advanced military technology was great against targets that would stay dead, but against an undead hoard that is simply incapable of stopping? All that high technology is next to useless.
**** The entirety of Cold War-era land warfare doctrine was about gearing up to fight a horde of Russians coming at your face at ridiculous odds, so I find it very unbelievable that the military has ''no'' tactics it could adapt to the problem of gearing up to fight a horde of zombies coming at your face at ridiculous odds. Especially since those Russians had tanks, airplanes, and artillery of their own, and the zombies don't. Sure, zombies are immune to pain or fear and will charge directly into gunfire without hesitating. ''This is not an unknown thing in warfare.'' The Moro berserkers in the Philippines? The Japanese banzai charges in World War II? The 10,000+ Somalis all hopped up out of their minds on khat during the Black Hawk Down incident? Any remotely armchair military historian can think up a dozen examples, and senior military planners are anything but 'armchair' military historians. The author, OTOH, apparently doesn't know basic military history or doctrine from his left elbow.
***** During the Cold War officers were routinely trained on map table exercises that involved scenarios such as 'World War III started today, the Fulda Gap is now full of Russian tanks coming at you at 20-to-1 odds, and the objective of this exercise is to die as slowly as possible. Good luck making it to two hours.' Since the novels are set in the early 90s, the entire senior officer corps will have ''grown up'' on shit like this. Saying that they've never put any thought into facing a horde defense scenario is ridiculous; that's the majority of what they ''have'' been doing. The entire reason the US military faced such a problematic adjustment period in getting used to 21st-century counterinsurgency warfare is because we were ''too'' trained up on expecting the major horde defense scenario.
***** Also, the first reaction to hearing 'The enemy will mindlessly charge forwards no matter what you do! They can't be intimidated or deterred!' should be 'Wait, did you just say that I can reliably bait them by showing them an obvious target and they'll fall for it ''every single time''? Holy shit! I now have the ability to dictate my enemy's movements according to my will! How can I lose?'
**** Wait, your argument is that what should have happened in the book doesn't make sense becasue it didn't happen in the book? We've discussed this before, shock and awe isn't shocking the enemy you're facing, it's about shocking the guys who heard about that massive gun that wiped out entire battalions of their soldiers.
**** It doesn't matter that the military was under-supplied and unprepared. By all rights the first wave of zombies should have been blown to smithereens, and the resulting wall of bodies causing a massive pileup preventing the rest of the zombies from advancing further. The zombie virus is one big example of [[You Fail Biology Forever]] and [[You Fail Physics Forever]].
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* Several parts of the book go into depth about America having just gone through a long brushfire war and a massive economic recession (where have I seen this before?) Its entirely possibly that more ammo than was supplied was deemed "wasteful" or some such nonsense. This also fits with the theory that the military wasn't expecting conventional tactics to be as useless as they were.
** As a result of a "bushfire war" which I'd (just as a guy posting from Iraq) assume would be characterized by being about continual ambush leads to people carrying less ammunition? I carry 255 rounds in combat, and go nowhere without an absolute minimum of 30 each for my pistol and rifle.
** Considering that the US Military expends approximately 250,000 rounds for every insurgent killed [https://web.archive.org/web/20110903123751/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-forced-to-import-bullets-from-israel-as-troops-use-250000-for-every-rebel-killed-508299.html source], it seems likely that they'd err on the side of caution in this aspect and bring more bullets, rather than less.
*** The problem was with planning; the people at the top wanted it to be a nice flashy PR op to show they were in control of the situation, and placed all their bets on their bigger guns taking out the majority of zombies with their troops being able to mop up the rest. Thy didn't err on the side of caution because that would be bad publicity by showing just how desperate the situation really was.
**** Which yet again highlights the author's ignorance and failure to do the research. Historically, the US military does "PR ops" not by showing off their elegant restraint and delicate preicsion, but instead by showing off their ability to crack walnuts by running them over with tanks. US military PR is based on the theory of 'the more overkill it is, the less anybody else wants to see it coming at them in the future'. If they ''really'' wanted to reassure the public that they could easily deal with zombies, they'd have reassured them by bombing the entire zip code into a smoking crater, then bombing it again because explosions look cool on TV, and then reassuring everybody 'we have more than enough bombs to do that anywhere and anytime a zombie so much as looks at you funny, so, chill'.
* It got so much [[Dan Browned]] and [[Did Not Do the Research]] is not even funny: The resistance of human body to the Shock and Awe weaponry (answer: [[Made of Plasticine|is not much]]), handwave the rest of the armament in existence, the effect of heat and cold in meat, metabolism and movility in dead bodies, The overuse of Incompetent goverment (Chinese goverment in real life while somewhat Facist, actually had a competent internal military and there are more competent Generals than those show in the book in the U.S) and this troper been a Psichologist can tell that the way of the use of Moral Damage, the reaction to danger from civilians and its ramifications is pure [[Gosh Dang It to Heck|crab]]. Doing Handwave and making some [[Bittersweet Ending]] is not a Deconstruction.
** [[Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]. Everything you just described is present in every large-scale zombie story in existance. Zombies do take damage from shock and awe weaponry, just not on an effective scale considering the size of the hordes, if you're honestly complaining about the effects of heat and cold on dead bodies than the Zombie genre is not for you, China wasn't incomptent at all (they managed to fool the entire world into thinking the zombie outbreak was just rumours and that they were planning something completely different), and I'll take your word for it, but last time I checked Max Brooks made no claim to 100% pyscholgical accuracy, or in fact 100% accuracy in anything. First and foremost, this is a work of fiction, and while he did do a lot of research for the book, a good story teller knows not to let the facts get in the way of a good story.
*** Consistent use doesn't make something any less inaccurate, especially when the plot relies on it. Just saying.
**** Yes, but the entire genre of zombie stories relies on it. It'd be like complaining about Science Fiction stories not being 100% scientifically accurate.
***** 100% accuracy may not be fairly expected, but that still doesn't give the author a license to use ''zero'' percent accuracy.
***** Also, Max Brooks was bragging on how ''his'' zombie story was much more accurate and well-researched than the average zombie story -- which means he's going to be held to higher expectations re: verisimilitude and internal consistency than the average zombie story. So the Breaks From Reality? Not so Acceptable.
** The human body is not very resistant to Shock and awe weaponry, but I'd say the human ''skull'' is. And against Romero-style zombies, it does not matter how much you electrify, gas or burn them, you need to damage the brain.
*** The skull is no more resistant to shock and awe weaponry than anything else. It can transfer pressure waves into the brain, and in extreme cases, be shredded into shrapnel that grinds the brain to paste. This is with a human skull, not even a decomposing, rotting, brittle-ly dehydrated skull.
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*** But these are shambling type zombies, they shouldn't have the motor skills for that and unless the zombies allow them to ignore some basic biology the zombies would still die out from lacking basic nutrients especially since cannibalism isn't very effective and with that in mind the zombies are basically perpetual motion monsters
**** The Zombie Survival Guide handwaves it with the way the virus works in that setting. Remember, just because it's slanted towards realism doesn't mean it has to be 100% realistic, since zombies are a medical imposiblity.
***** Author handwaving ia a debit against a finite account of credibility, and if you overuse it then you end up bankrupt and with the reader going 'Oh, ''fuck'' this bullshit.' Which is exactly why World War Z has a Headscratchers page this long and this detailed.
* Why would the Israelis take the chance to rescue the Palestinians; Even fighting a civil war against their OWN PEOPLE for them? That's the most implausible part of the book for me, especially when they could just let the Zombie Apocalypse wipe out their enemies for good.
** Maybe, because not rescuing the Palestinians would [[What an Idiot!|result in a load more zombies being available to attack Israel]]. Also, the zombies have not yet reached Israel, so there won't be this problem there with the civil war.
Line 100 ⟶ 120:
** One, the American news tends to keep to the party line. Two, ad revenue.
*** What party line? That's a gross generalization, and not really reflecting how American news actually works. Half the American news might support whoever's in charge, but the other half would be trying to paint them as Satan.
**** The distribution of news networks is somewhat less than 50-50 across the political divide (its more like 80-20 weighted in one direction), but you are substantially correct in that no matter which side was in charge or what they were doing, ''someone'' would be complaining about it loudly and at length -- the only variable would be which someones.
** It was supposed to be satirical of Americans having short attention spans, the media being superficial, and the government being beheld to corporate interests (as well as short-sighted and looking for a quick fix). There's obviously some exaggeration involved, but I think you can chalk a lot of it up to a misunderstanding of the situation. We know that the Great Panic really got off in April, which is around the time through most of the continental US when it gets warm enough to stay above freezing temperatures. Since zombies freeze solid in freezing temperatures, it's not a stretch to imagine that zombie cases dropped heavily when the previous winter showed up, and the media incorrectly attributed that to Phalanx and its knock-off drugs.
** Satire is funny "justification" in book that claims realism
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