World War Z/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

** 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.

** 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''.

*** 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''.

***** '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]].

** "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.

** 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.

***** 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.

* 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.

*** 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'.

**** 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.

** 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.