Why there is no Army left; How Zombies defeated the US-Army
greetings from germany.
i know the following text is not from the walking dead, but i think its very interesting and fun to read and its an explanation what happened in the maintime and why there is no army left
.
enjoy as i did.
PRELUDE
(...)
on of the first heavy outbrakes was in new york city. to prevent the usa to be overrun by zombies, they tried to stop the zombies from getting out of new york. so they build their defences in yonkers, a suburb of new york.
(...)
THE BATTLE
Several elements of the United States Armed Forces were deployed along the Saw Mill River Parkway in North Yonkers. While the parkway served as a natural choke point (the only intelligent tactic that military leadership employed, as described by a surviving veteran), it made no difference in the final result. Utilizing antiquated tactics dating back to the Cold War, positions were prepared in such ways as digging tank emplacements, building barriers out of sandbags, and in foxholes. The zombie hordes from the city were lured into the choke point by the handful of refugees still fleeing towards the army's position, and due to the chain swarm effect, gradually the entire New York City infestation, numbering in the millions, was headed towards Yonkers.
When zombies first began to trickle down the freeway, the opening salvos were fired - two MLRS rocket barrages which destroyed a significant percentage of the first wave but ultimately made few kills zombies with limbs and torsos blown off could still advance so long as they had an intact brain and some means to drag themselves forward. As the undead became more tightly packed, the MLRS lost effectiveness, with the thick swarms of zombies reducing the possibility of a head wound significantly. The second barrage came from M109 Paladin artillery stationed on a hill to the rear of the infantry. They fired fragmentation shells which had even less of an effect than the MLRS barrages. The artillery strikes depended on the "balloon effect," which by proximity to an explosion would cause the liquid in the victim's body to burst. This did not occur, however, because of the zombie's coagulated blood. Therefore, SNT (Sudden Nerve Trauma), which "just shuts down vital organs like God flickin' a light switch," did not happen either.[1]
After this, the infantry, armor and air support opened fire on the "river of undead humans". Firing on the zombies were the full military might of the United States Army: M1 Abrams tanks, M2 Bradleys, Humvees, mortars and several RAH-66 Comanche helicopters. All of these held sustained fire for a time in what was likened to "a meatgrinder, or a wood chipper..."[2] until the anti-personnel ammunition ran out. In fact, little of it had even been provided for the tanks. The armor and helicopters then switched over to Anti-Tank rounds like HEAT or Sabot shells which had little to no effect on the swelling tide of undead.
The infantry were left fighting the undead in close proximity, and there were even zombies locked in the houses behind the front line of infantry that had been freed by the explosions, ambushing and devouring unsuspecting troops. Other soldiers could see everything, through the weapon mounted cameras of the front-line soldiers (thanks to the Land Warrior system); the hordes closing in, their fellow soldiers falling and being eaten alive and even reports of zombies not dying when being shot in the head (this happened because the rounds grazed their heads, something panicking soldiers failed to notice). F-35 fighter jets launched AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon, dropping hundreds of thousands of explosive devices.
The bombing run decimated the oncoming wave and resulted in a few moments of eerie silence as the dazed and confused soldiers recovered from the shock of the nearby explosions. However, even more zombies shuffled up the road to take their place. At that point the battle turned into utter chaos, as the soldiers on the ground saw an oncoming wave of millions more zombies emerging from the smoke clouds from the bombs that had taken out the first several thousand. Satellite images from the Land Warrior system still showed a horde of millions of zombies stretching back into Times Square on Manhattan island. In a notable act of desperation one helicopter gunship bravely tried to buy time for infantry on the ground to retreat by flying low towards the zombie horde with its rotary blades tipped forward; this sliced through many zombies and slowed their advance, but then one of the helicopter's blades hit a wrecked car, causing it to crash and explode.
News crews clambered over one another to get away from the coming onslaught and military personnel sought refuge anywhere they could from the zombies. There was crazy, random shooting from soldiers and armed newsmen in a blind panic. The Air Force dropped several thermobaric weapons on the zombies and their own troops hoping to neutralize the undead at Yonkers in one sweep (which had the gruesome side-effect of ripping lungs out of individuals not destroyed by the initial blast, leaving numerous ghouls wandering around with their lungs hanging out of their mouths). It accomplished its purpose of destroying the majority of zombies from that battle but many more still poured in from Manhattan, overpowering the American forces and proving, to devastating effect, and on national television no less, that the war with the undead could not be won with conventional tactics. Within 3 weeks after Yonkers, the eastern United States was abandoned by the United States military in a mass retreat to a new defensive line at the Rocky Mountains.
What went wrongEdit
The Battle of Yonkers was an unmitigated disaster for the military. Public confidence in them and the United States Government was shattered, and this contributed heavily to the Great Panic and claimed the lives of many more Americans.
Tactics Edit
The tactics used by the army dated back to plans against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. After years of fighting brushfire wars, the "Fulda Fucktards" (sic) who had come of age during the Cold War were overjoyed to have an opportunity to fight a conventional battle and completely ignored the new, untested nature of the undead enemy. Instead of placing infantry in positions of overwatch and in elevated areas with excellent lines of fire, the soldiers were forced to fight on the ground and were quickly overrun. The higher-ups failed to prepare for what was essentially a human wave attack, and should have had fewer men on the ground and more indirect fire units. The soldiers were also outfitted with "Land Warrior" gear which, amongst other things, provided each soldier with a radar readout of the surrounding area for miles around. This included the hordes of zombies that started coming soon after the battle began. Seeing the thousands of zombies, many soldiers lost their composure and would use the Land Warrior communication up link (this allowed each soldier to share communications) to share frantic shouts and hurried claims once they started being overrun, which in turn significantly decreased morale. The soldiers used foxholes, of all things, as part of what the commanders said was a "concealment" technique (designed only for enemies that fired weapons, not for ones that sniffed you out), but popular consensus is that all the fancy equipment, foxholes and everything else was to put on to show the American people the high-tech prowess of the US military over the zombies.
Another problem was that the military instruction that these soldiers had been undergoing for years had trained them to shoot at a target's center of mass (torso, because it is the most difficult to miss), and although the soldiers at Yonkers had been informed that the only way to kill a zombie was with a head shot, they had little experience with doing so and could not easily switch to aiming at a new smaller target.
Equipment
The soldiers were ordered to wear protective MOPP (MOPP Level 4) gear, (used in case of chemical or biological warfare) which greatly impairs one's ability to fight by restricting eyesight, range of motion and respiration. The MOPP4 gear was unnecessary and done as part of the gigantic propaganda tool that Yonkers was supposed to be; re-instilling morale and confidence in the government's control of the situation by showcasing all of the military's newest and most high-tech technologies (i.e. deploying several technological cutting-edge anti-vehicle tanks and weapons, even though these would be next to useless against zombies). Bulky MOPP4 gear made it incredibly difficult simply to reload infantry rifles, and ammunition was also in short supply as they had not accurately gauged how much shooting would be required (few of the standard infantry were expected to even actually shoot, just during mopping-up work after the artillery barrage finished off most of the zombies, but instead they all found themselves fighting for their lives).
In addition, the soldiers had been made to spend an entire hot August day (one of the warmest on record, due to all of the smoke from fires caused by the chaos of the zombie epidemic) digging fox holes and entrenchments while wearing the MOPP4 gear, pushing them near to exhaustion. The entrenchments and foxholes were meant to provide "Cover and Concealment", when the whole point was to draw the enemy toward the firing line (negating the need for Concealment), and an enemy that didn't even use weapons (negating the need for cover). The most convincing point about the MOPP4 gear being unnecessary and "for show" is that military officers and civilian reporters walking around along the defensive line were in no way required to wear protective gear of any kind, and had the military seriously thought the zombie virus might be airborne (which it is not) they would have required command officers and news crews to wear them as well.
A good deal of the equipment was there for no other reason than to just "look pretty". The Land Warrior system, as of this writing in 2011, is still in an experimental stage and has yet to be consistently used by deployed troops. There were radar and comm jamming equipment (zombies do not use radar or any form of communication other than guttural moans and screams); a pontoon-bridge layer system "perfect for the 3-in. deep creek running along the parkway"; a tank line when zombies do not use tanks; foxholes and tank fortifications were built to repel a shooting army when zombie hordes use no firearms whatsoever; even a whole F.O.L. (Family of Latrines) module was placed right in the center of the forward command center despite the fact that all the plumbing in all the surrounding buildings and houses was still running. All this useless equipment just wound up clogging traffic, making it more difficult to move around. Machine guns were available on most vehicles, but proved ineffective. Zombies fired upon by machine guns simply broke in half and crawled at ankle-level, making them slower but more dangerous as they became a much lower target to hit.
The Land Warrior system, which effectively connected each soldier to every other by use of video cameras, proved perhaps the most fatal mistake: morale disintegrated soon after soldiers watched their brothers-in-arms panicking, retreating, and being eaten alive, all on a monitor built into their helmets. It also showed soldiers live satellite camera feeds showing the entire miles-long horde of several million zombies pouring out of New York City towards them, making it difficult to focus on fighting the ones immediately facing them when faced with the full magnitude of the zombie horde.
The conventional anti-tank ordnance was also useless against an army of zombies, as many of the depleted uranium rounds had no effect but to fly straight through the undead and pass harmlessly to the rear of the advancing mass. Once all anti-personnel rounds were fired from the tanks, the tank crews switched to anti-tank rounds; Wainio noted how demoralizing it is to witness a tank fire its' main cannon into a zombie crowd with little effect. The men in charge of the battle failed to properly equip their forces for anti-infantry operations; from the outset, anti-tank weaponry should have been discarded, and AFVs loaded with HEI-T (High Explosive Incendiary, Tracer) rounds. The old guard of the US military command had relied too much on their own technological superiority, not adapting to the zombie threat. There were also noted to be HMMWV's with anti-air systems, which would be even less effective on the undead than anti-tank ordnance.
One of the greatest ironies of the battle is that even if the military commanders had thought that M1 Abrams tanks firing anti-vehicle weapons were useful against the infantry-based undead, they simply did not supply enough ammunition for them to shoot. Even if the anti-tank rounds the forces at Yonkers were supplied with were effective against zombies, they quickly ran out. The counter-argument for this is that due to the poor state of the US economy it was difficult to produce that much ammunition. Nonetheless, the US military command grossly underestimated how much ammunition they needed, and it was short-sighted to put soldiers into harms way with "the army you have" rather than waiting to be fully supplied. Even if the military commanders sent soldiers into the battle without enough ammunition, recognizing that they were under-supplied but simply had no choice because the zombies were taking over, in no way should they have walked into the battle hyping it to the media as a "decisive victory" that would wipe out the zombies.
Essentially, rather than giving good sniping positions, they gave them tanks, helicopters, machine guns, and restrictive suits, none of which had any real effect on the horde. If the military had placed a group of any size on a rooftop with a properly sighted M16, or other similar weapon and the ammunition to supply them, the battle would have been drastically more successful.
source: http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yonkers
i know the following text is not from the walking dead, but i think its very interesting and fun to read and its an explanation what happened in the maintime and why there is no army left
.enjoy as i did.
PRELUDE
(...)
on of the first heavy outbrakes was in new york city. to prevent the usa to be overrun by zombies, they tried to stop the zombies from getting out of new york. so they build their defences in yonkers, a suburb of new york.
(...)
THE BATTLE
Several elements of the United States Armed Forces were deployed along the Saw Mill River Parkway in North Yonkers. While the parkway served as a natural choke point (the only intelligent tactic that military leadership employed, as described by a surviving veteran), it made no difference in the final result. Utilizing antiquated tactics dating back to the Cold War, positions were prepared in such ways as digging tank emplacements, building barriers out of sandbags, and in foxholes. The zombie hordes from the city were lured into the choke point by the handful of refugees still fleeing towards the army's position, and due to the chain swarm effect, gradually the entire New York City infestation, numbering in the millions, was headed towards Yonkers.
When zombies first began to trickle down the freeway, the opening salvos were fired - two MLRS rocket barrages which destroyed a significant percentage of the first wave but ultimately made few kills zombies with limbs and torsos blown off could still advance so long as they had an intact brain and some means to drag themselves forward. As the undead became more tightly packed, the MLRS lost effectiveness, with the thick swarms of zombies reducing the possibility of a head wound significantly. The second barrage came from M109 Paladin artillery stationed on a hill to the rear of the infantry. They fired fragmentation shells which had even less of an effect than the MLRS barrages. The artillery strikes depended on the "balloon effect," which by proximity to an explosion would cause the liquid in the victim's body to burst. This did not occur, however, because of the zombie's coagulated blood. Therefore, SNT (Sudden Nerve Trauma), which "just shuts down vital organs like God flickin' a light switch," did not happen either.[1]
After this, the infantry, armor and air support opened fire on the "river of undead humans". Firing on the zombies were the full military might of the United States Army: M1 Abrams tanks, M2 Bradleys, Humvees, mortars and several RAH-66 Comanche helicopters. All of these held sustained fire for a time in what was likened to "a meatgrinder, or a wood chipper..."[2] until the anti-personnel ammunition ran out. In fact, little of it had even been provided for the tanks. The armor and helicopters then switched over to Anti-Tank rounds like HEAT or Sabot shells which had little to no effect on the swelling tide of undead.
The infantry were left fighting the undead in close proximity, and there were even zombies locked in the houses behind the front line of infantry that had been freed by the explosions, ambushing and devouring unsuspecting troops. Other soldiers could see everything, through the weapon mounted cameras of the front-line soldiers (thanks to the Land Warrior system); the hordes closing in, their fellow soldiers falling and being eaten alive and even reports of zombies not dying when being shot in the head (this happened because the rounds grazed their heads, something panicking soldiers failed to notice). F-35 fighter jets launched AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon, dropping hundreds of thousands of explosive devices.
The bombing run decimated the oncoming wave and resulted in a few moments of eerie silence as the dazed and confused soldiers recovered from the shock of the nearby explosions. However, even more zombies shuffled up the road to take their place. At that point the battle turned into utter chaos, as the soldiers on the ground saw an oncoming wave of millions more zombies emerging from the smoke clouds from the bombs that had taken out the first several thousand. Satellite images from the Land Warrior system still showed a horde of millions of zombies stretching back into Times Square on Manhattan island. In a notable act of desperation one helicopter gunship bravely tried to buy time for infantry on the ground to retreat by flying low towards the zombie horde with its rotary blades tipped forward; this sliced through many zombies and slowed their advance, but then one of the helicopter's blades hit a wrecked car, causing it to crash and explode.
News crews clambered over one another to get away from the coming onslaught and military personnel sought refuge anywhere they could from the zombies. There was crazy, random shooting from soldiers and armed newsmen in a blind panic. The Air Force dropped several thermobaric weapons on the zombies and their own troops hoping to neutralize the undead at Yonkers in one sweep (which had the gruesome side-effect of ripping lungs out of individuals not destroyed by the initial blast, leaving numerous ghouls wandering around with their lungs hanging out of their mouths). It accomplished its purpose of destroying the majority of zombies from that battle but many more still poured in from Manhattan, overpowering the American forces and proving, to devastating effect, and on national television no less, that the war with the undead could not be won with conventional tactics. Within 3 weeks after Yonkers, the eastern United States was abandoned by the United States military in a mass retreat to a new defensive line at the Rocky Mountains.
What went wrongEdit
The Battle of Yonkers was an unmitigated disaster for the military. Public confidence in them and the United States Government was shattered, and this contributed heavily to the Great Panic and claimed the lives of many more Americans.
Tactics Edit
The tactics used by the army dated back to plans against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. After years of fighting brushfire wars, the "Fulda Fucktards" (sic) who had come of age during the Cold War were overjoyed to have an opportunity to fight a conventional battle and completely ignored the new, untested nature of the undead enemy. Instead of placing infantry in positions of overwatch and in elevated areas with excellent lines of fire, the soldiers were forced to fight on the ground and were quickly overrun. The higher-ups failed to prepare for what was essentially a human wave attack, and should have had fewer men on the ground and more indirect fire units. The soldiers were also outfitted with "Land Warrior" gear which, amongst other things, provided each soldier with a radar readout of the surrounding area for miles around. This included the hordes of zombies that started coming soon after the battle began. Seeing the thousands of zombies, many soldiers lost their composure and would use the Land Warrior communication up link (this allowed each soldier to share communications) to share frantic shouts and hurried claims once they started being overrun, which in turn significantly decreased morale. The soldiers used foxholes, of all things, as part of what the commanders said was a "concealment" technique (designed only for enemies that fired weapons, not for ones that sniffed you out), but popular consensus is that all the fancy equipment, foxholes and everything else was to put on to show the American people the high-tech prowess of the US military over the zombies.
Another problem was that the military instruction that these soldiers had been undergoing for years had trained them to shoot at a target's center of mass (torso, because it is the most difficult to miss), and although the soldiers at Yonkers had been informed that the only way to kill a zombie was with a head shot, they had little experience with doing so and could not easily switch to aiming at a new smaller target.
Equipment
The soldiers were ordered to wear protective MOPP (MOPP Level 4) gear, (used in case of chemical or biological warfare) which greatly impairs one's ability to fight by restricting eyesight, range of motion and respiration. The MOPP4 gear was unnecessary and done as part of the gigantic propaganda tool that Yonkers was supposed to be; re-instilling morale and confidence in the government's control of the situation by showcasing all of the military's newest and most high-tech technologies (i.e. deploying several technological cutting-edge anti-vehicle tanks and weapons, even though these would be next to useless against zombies). Bulky MOPP4 gear made it incredibly difficult simply to reload infantry rifles, and ammunition was also in short supply as they had not accurately gauged how much shooting would be required (few of the standard infantry were expected to even actually shoot, just during mopping-up work after the artillery barrage finished off most of the zombies, but instead they all found themselves fighting for their lives).
In addition, the soldiers had been made to spend an entire hot August day (one of the warmest on record, due to all of the smoke from fires caused by the chaos of the zombie epidemic) digging fox holes and entrenchments while wearing the MOPP4 gear, pushing them near to exhaustion. The entrenchments and foxholes were meant to provide "Cover and Concealment", when the whole point was to draw the enemy toward the firing line (negating the need for Concealment), and an enemy that didn't even use weapons (negating the need for cover). The most convincing point about the MOPP4 gear being unnecessary and "for show" is that military officers and civilian reporters walking around along the defensive line were in no way required to wear protective gear of any kind, and had the military seriously thought the zombie virus might be airborne (which it is not) they would have required command officers and news crews to wear them as well.
A good deal of the equipment was there for no other reason than to just "look pretty". The Land Warrior system, as of this writing in 2011, is still in an experimental stage and has yet to be consistently used by deployed troops. There were radar and comm jamming equipment (zombies do not use radar or any form of communication other than guttural moans and screams); a pontoon-bridge layer system "perfect for the 3-in. deep creek running along the parkway"; a tank line when zombies do not use tanks; foxholes and tank fortifications were built to repel a shooting army when zombie hordes use no firearms whatsoever; even a whole F.O.L. (Family of Latrines) module was placed right in the center of the forward command center despite the fact that all the plumbing in all the surrounding buildings and houses was still running. All this useless equipment just wound up clogging traffic, making it more difficult to move around. Machine guns were available on most vehicles, but proved ineffective. Zombies fired upon by machine guns simply broke in half and crawled at ankle-level, making them slower but more dangerous as they became a much lower target to hit.
The Land Warrior system, which effectively connected each soldier to every other by use of video cameras, proved perhaps the most fatal mistake: morale disintegrated soon after soldiers watched their brothers-in-arms panicking, retreating, and being eaten alive, all on a monitor built into their helmets. It also showed soldiers live satellite camera feeds showing the entire miles-long horde of several million zombies pouring out of New York City towards them, making it difficult to focus on fighting the ones immediately facing them when faced with the full magnitude of the zombie horde.
The conventional anti-tank ordnance was also useless against an army of zombies, as many of the depleted uranium rounds had no effect but to fly straight through the undead and pass harmlessly to the rear of the advancing mass. Once all anti-personnel rounds were fired from the tanks, the tank crews switched to anti-tank rounds; Wainio noted how demoralizing it is to witness a tank fire its' main cannon into a zombie crowd with little effect. The men in charge of the battle failed to properly equip their forces for anti-infantry operations; from the outset, anti-tank weaponry should have been discarded, and AFVs loaded with HEI-T (High Explosive Incendiary, Tracer) rounds. The old guard of the US military command had relied too much on their own technological superiority, not adapting to the zombie threat. There were also noted to be HMMWV's with anti-air systems, which would be even less effective on the undead than anti-tank ordnance.
One of the greatest ironies of the battle is that even if the military commanders had thought that M1 Abrams tanks firing anti-vehicle weapons were useful against the infantry-based undead, they simply did not supply enough ammunition for them to shoot. Even if the anti-tank rounds the forces at Yonkers were supplied with were effective against zombies, they quickly ran out. The counter-argument for this is that due to the poor state of the US economy it was difficult to produce that much ammunition. Nonetheless, the US military command grossly underestimated how much ammunition they needed, and it was short-sighted to put soldiers into harms way with "the army you have" rather than waiting to be fully supplied. Even if the military commanders sent soldiers into the battle without enough ammunition, recognizing that they were under-supplied but simply had no choice because the zombies were taking over, in no way should they have walked into the battle hyping it to the media as a "decisive victory" that would wipe out the zombies.
Essentially, rather than giving good sniping positions, they gave them tanks, helicopters, machine guns, and restrictive suits, none of which had any real effect on the horde. If the military had placed a group of any size on a rooftop with a properly sighted M16, or other similar weapon and the ammunition to supply them, the battle would have been drastically more successful.
source: http://zombie.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yonkers
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
First, I have no where he's getting this "SNT" nonsense from. Just as bad is the author's ridiculous notion that heavy artillery is somehow less effective against densely packed zombies, since the more densely packed they are means each individual shell is effecting more targets. Artillery, whether rocket or tube primarily kills people in one of two ways:
1.) Over/Underpressure, where an explosion creates a shockwave in the atmosphere, it tends to have a greater effect on gas or fluid-filled parts of the body (which is what I assume the author's getting this "balloon effect" stuff from), but make no mistake, over/underpressure can just as easily tear limbs and heads right off of torsos. Even more notable? It'll turn the brain to mush without even having to break through the skull simply by entering through the various holes in the face (mouth, nose, ears, etc.). If absurdity like helicopter blenders work, so will over/underpressure effects.
2.) Shrapnel, i.e. those sharp, twisted pieces of metal that rip, tear, slice and dice through flesh and bone. Yes, they will go through an unprotected head just fine.
The 155mm M795 HE Shell (the sort of round the Paladin fires) has a lethal radius of 50 meters from what I recall, with a potential to kill at twice that. Even cutting that in half to kill/cripple zombies, you're looking at hundreds dead per shell since they're densely packed on a highway, oh, and that round can be fired accurately at a range of about 30km. Each sub-munition in an MLRS warhead sends out shrapnel with a lethal radius of 8 meters, not the warhead itself, just an individual sub-munition. The number of sub-munitions in a single warhead? Over 600. They easily go through flesh, bone, etc. at that rate, you almost don't need to pick up body parts afterwards, you go fetch a mop.
In short, the author woefully underestimates the power of heavy artillery, and doesn't even seem to grasp how it functions. This trend continues.
Something like the 120mm Sabot would be one of more effective rounds against a dense pack of squishies, zombies or no. The round's going to go through an arbitrary number of them, and the round is large enough to create a huge wound channel (i.e. lots of physical damage) regardless of where it hits, and god forbid it yaws and starts tumbling.
This is also ignoring the obvious, a tank's a 70 ton block of armor on tracks, there's nothing the zombies can do to it. Hell, it doesn't even need to fire to kill zombies, just hit the gas. Sure, maintenance and cleaning would suck afterwards.
Also, Land Warrior does not work that way.
It's also somewhat ironic that the tactics are pegged for being Cold-War era, but the author apparently doesn't understand those either
Ironically enough, the suggestion given to move to the rooftops would've been one of the worst things to do, since those positions would've been isolated and would've required air dropped resupply.
But how about this for a really short version of what happened to the US army:
It was deployed all over the world and as a result did not have the numbers needed to adequately respond to the situation "at home" As a result it had to rely heavily on its reserve forces who were living at home as part of the population and suffered greatly once the outbreak occurred.
As a result the military response was nearly non existent
Even if they are not killed, limbs will be flying all over the place. And a zombie with no arms or leggs will not be much of a threat to anyone but a turtle.
Sure, if there was literally millions of zombies coming out of new york i can see how it would be a problem with ammunition.
But long before everyone ran out there would be a tactical withdrawal covered by tanks and those 50 cal machineguns mounted on just about every military vehicle today.
But that would piss off the UN.
After all, the UN would be looking at other options, such as negotiating with the zombies.
Need a negotiater. I'm imagining some hostage situation with a zombie eating some guys brain.
While UN was busy talking, and listening to small pisspoor nations who really shouldnt have a say, because they dont matter. The infection spread and the military that was not permitted to fire, because of the UN.... was overrun.
Pfff, we never much listened to the U.N. beforehand, I don't see much reason to assume that would change, especially with regard to ROE. About the most they could do about it is write a sternly worded letter.
lol this is so typical..
Is the original poster going to say more or just post a wikipedia-researched article?
Oh yes, because, as we all know, a Zombie Grabbing at you and bumping into things isn't dangerous enough. We need them to be on FIRE for a good 5-10 mins first! :rolleyes:
As for whose fault it is... I think it would take a while for people to realize what's going on. I mean, yeah we have zombie media but still we'd look for every possible alternative bore saying "yep "zombies"". In the Walking Dead Universe, the Zombie Genre never made a big hit on mainstream culture, they have no idea what these things are! They might even think they can't be stopped unless they see one go down to a head shot... The Psychological Factors, along with how long it'd take to figure it all out, are probably the main cause.
Imagine, for a moment: being forced to play a type of game you've never played, from a Genre you're unfamiliar with, on a console you didn't even know existed, without a manual, controls option, or in game tutorials... Now add to it you only get one life, and if you lose it it's game over forever and you can't even tell anyone else playing what you've learned unless you meet them and have the conversation in game.
I think it's pretty obvious why The Walking Dead world went to shit.
This. No matter how well versed people are in zombie lore, they're not going to abandon or finish off the wounded on the basis of what has been, up until that moment, fiction. Which means that the police and military are going to have lots of potential reanimatees behind the lines before reported disasters proving that people who are dead and dying will soon become the enemy.
( I mentioned police, but if the thing got off to a slow start and the cops tried arresting the "crazy junkies", they might be the first to go)
Napalm burns at a minimum temperature (from what I remember) of around 1,500 degrees F, with a high-end of a little over 2,000 F. Even ignoring the fact that it'd likely cook a zombie's brain inside the skull (water boils at what, a couple hundred degrees?), it's still going to destroy muscle tissue, ligaments, etc. which'll keep it from moving.
Considering a single air-dropped bomb effects an area of something like a few thousand yards, it's a valid point. If you're close enough to be grabbed, you screwed up and have bigger problems anyway, like being in the area of effect.
The only infantrymen that really have a "one shot, one kill" mentality are snipers, the overwhelming majority of ammunition expended during a firefight is used for stuff like suppressive fire (i.e. just spraying rounds in the general direction of the enemy so they're more focused on trying to stay alive under cover rather than oh, trying to kill you), with zombies, you don't need to bother since they can't shoot back and won't bother trying to avoid incoming fire. You can just take aimed shots as you like, then fall back if necessary. You shouldn't be outrun by shambling zombies either (even without motor transport), and shots against the hip or legs are still going to cripple them, since those structures simply can't bear weight when shattered by having holes punched in them.
Even if we exclude heavy stuff like armor and artillery (which zombies can't do squat against) and assume just infantry, just by virtue of probability, the amount of lead thrown into the air will guarantee killed/crippled zombies even if they don't know or even consider aiming for the head... and the instant they see one go down to a head shot, that news is going out over the radio.
yes i think tihis is what happened a lot in civil areas, police, military and so on.
i think when they REALLY realise what happened the command and operation structure was already broke down. and with no logistic support, they can´t resist long at any point.
also perhaps most of the national gurad was at home by their families when the outbreak cames.
that is the main question: how fast was the outbreak? was there any signs for it? any time to respond? or did they just underestimate the whole situation?
Yeah, but, IDK. The idea of corpses walking at you. I know a guy who said he'd dessert if that stuff went down... I mean, a wall of lead is good and all, but also from what I know of the military they're trained for body shots right?
What if word comes in of people putting whole clips into these walking corpses, but they won't stop. Maybe fall to the ground, but still not end them.
(PS: In the TV Series, Randal was up and moving around with a broken neck... So, I mean...)
i dont think it would take long, and even if the military had already sent in and lost it's more traditional front line forces, they would still have thousands of troops (people on ships/aircraft carriers and in secure bases) to deploy their more well thought out plans.
When there is an oppurtunity to make aimed shots, yeah, we're taught to aim center mass (simply because it's easier to hit, especially when time is a factor). Even then, the rifle's typically a support weapon; everything else in the arsenal inflicts more casualties. The rifle's primary use is to keep the enemy pinned until you can have something bigger come along to finish them off. That being said, we do wear helmets for a reason (granted, shrapnel's a part of that reason).
Hell, even if someone who didn't know that shots to the head were needed to kill them, it'd actually be pretty intuitive to shoot them in the face anyway. This shmuck trying to bite folks isn't dying after being shot X number of times in the chest? Well then, we can atleast keep him from biting by turning his head into chunky salsa, he can't bite anybody if he doesn't have a mouth anymore.
Or how about. Everyone is infected. But some people can live with the infection. While others got sick and died?
Imagine waking up one morning and 50% or more of the world population has become zombies, or is about to become zombies very soon.
I'm not a military nerd myself so I can't contribute much to the discussion of weapons effectiveness, but I can expand a little on my initial points.
* I haven't read the comics and I've only seen the first season of the TV series, so I don't know how things went down in Kirkman's world. The tv series shows a lot of dead soldiers and abandoned hardware in Atlanta, so there may have been a Battle of Yonkers scenario, although I have difficulty believing a force with no weapons and no tactical capacity would pose a serious threat to a modern military in a direct battle, so I suspect the primary reason for the absence of an active military presence is that otherwise the story would be a lot shorter.
* I think the most plausible in-world reason involves the speed at which the zombie threat escalated, compared to the speed at which it could be recognised as such and an appropriate response devised. Initial repsonses such as trying to arrest "rioters" and gathering survivors including wounded together in refugee centres would have made things worse and hit first responders hard - and if outbreaks are happening all over the world at the same time, there's limited opportunity to learn from the first disaster before the next one hits. I think it's plausible that a rapidly developing outbreak would result in a sufficiently diminished military that a rescue operation of the kind our heroes hope for is implausible - particularly allowing for reservists deciding to stay and defend their families, and the difficulty of securing any kind of safe zone against Kirkman zombies who can rise from any corpse with an intact brain.
*The best guess I can make at a timeline comes from the game, the events of which seem to take place over five days at most, ending with Glenn's radio telling of widespread destruction but some semblance of civil authority still around (to classify all the disaster areas in the report)
I covered a good chunk of what I found to be incorrect in my ridiculously long post at the start of the thread. Incidentally, I didn't plan for that post to be that long, it's just that the depiction of the battle is like a Matryoshka doll of wrongness on the author's part.
It actually occurs to me that in that scenario, they could have simply lured the zombies to a highway overpass, blown a gap in it at the highest point, and position a one-man band or guy with a megaphone on the other side of that gap to make a bunch of noise and just let the zombies fall to their deaths as they tried to reach him.
I think most government/police/fire/etc. had no idea what was going on just a lot of civil unrest and the usual attacks that go on in big cities..even bites. The national guard was most likely called up when it was way too late since this requires activation by each state governor. Remember Katrina? The state governor had no idea it was up to him to request federal assistance and call up the national guard and that washington was waiting on him so they could act. Ah the bureaucracy.
The active military on the other hand would respond differently. Once walker attacks occured on more than one base the military would misinterpret the ZA as a coordinated terrorist attack against priority assets. All bases worldwide would be locked down and anyone "walking" around the base would be challenged. Many bases would still be lost but a few would survive.
Anyway, I think they all fought well, stayed at thier post, served their country to the best of their abilities and put down a LOT of walkers. Unfortunately, there are just too damn many walkers!
Everyone's infected. If you suicide, you zombify. If you heartattack, you zombify.
The confidence of the army would be shambled at this piece of information eluding them.
You can have the perfect zombie defense,but attacks from within, are unexpected and surprise. Heavens would know what would happen if a swarm forms within a military base and starts eatting(no pun intended) the military tactics from the inside out.
Suicide would be common: I mean, c'mon, everyone you knew is 99% dead! That pain alone would cause so much additional mental ailment.
I find it believable that military is out of service in the Walking Dead story.
Except the knowledge that people come back regardless of how they die probably wouldn't remain a secret for all that long, which means the cat's going to be out of the bag far sooner than later. With the exception of mosquitoes (which are already everywhere, small enough to evade immediate notice, capable of flight, and don't kill their victims within hours), biting's also a pretty ineffective way to spread disease right off the bat... which isn't helped by the fact that Walking Dead zombies are slow-moving shamblers and are far from inconspicuous.
There's some things that zombies just can't do squat against - let's be realistic, they're not going to be biting through any form of AFV (armored fighting vehicle) - Those are flat out impenetrable to zombies. Likewise for simple shoot and scoot using motorized transport, there's literally nothing zombies could do about it. They don't use tools, think, plan, etc. at its core, a zombie's still more or less a human except it's been stripped of all that stuff which got us to the top of the food chain in the first place.
The diseases that spread the farthest tend to do so because they're undectable with relatively long incubation times... zombies offer neither of those. You'd need a mass die-off first for a zombie swarm to even realistically form, and even that'd be iffy after the 2nd or 3rd person comes back from the dead. Likewise, the instant somebody gets bit and starts reporting they feel sick, with death and reanimation following shortly thereafter, people would start putting two-and-two together, in which case you'd start seeing preventative measures like quarantine, etc.
There's a reason the overwhelming majority of ZA fiction (the Walking Dead included) doesn't show how the apocalypse started, i.e. how you go from that first zombie/patient zero to millions upon millions of zombies, because it's nigh-impossible to show a credible way it happens... nevermind how a mechanized army fails, but a bunch of plucky survivors are able to keep on trucking well after the fact.
If you assume the initial outbreaks are simultaneous, there would be huge loss of life in population centres, with people reanimating in hospitals surrounded by other patients who can't easily escape. By the time the Army is deployed, they could be facing the biggest counter-insurgency campaign ever.
Except there's the small issue that the zombies are shown to be slow, I mean hell, Lee was able to outrun them with a gimp leg. At the end of the day, we're still looking at what are ultimately slow shamblers that lost everything that got us to the top of the food chain, don't know to avoid danger, and they can be distracted by bright lights and loud noises, which for me brings up the funny image of them trying to attack things like fire engines (it also means they'll head towards things like explosions and not away from them).
That's also the problem with trying to compare it to counter-insurgency, what makes COIN difficult (aside from the fact that living, thinking people can shoot back) is that the insurgents can blend into the ordinary population; just another fish in the ocean. Zombies... can't.
The one main similarity between a zombie infestation and an insurgency is that there's no real front-line. We agree that if a zombie invasion lined up and marched over the border, they wouldn't last a day. With Kirkman zombies, potential enemies are everywhere - anybody who dies with an intact brain becomes an enemy, and can breed more if not put down. Therefore, it's a constant challenge securing any area where there's a concentration of people.
In Kirkman's world, the government initially tried to concentrate people in the cities for protection, indicating that some manner of control was restored, but Atlanta fell within a week (in the game Glenn sets out for Atlanta a week after the outbreak, in the comic/tv show he says Atlanta had fallen by the time he got there), probably because of the numbers of zombies that could spawn in a mob of frightened and confused people before an armed response could be mounted. In the first comic, Glenn loots a gun store in Atlanta that isn't sold out - presumably the authorities thought that the need for citizens to arm themselves against the walkers didn't outweigh the danger from letting large groups of frightened angry people have guns.
They (the military) got grossly outnumbered and eaten, sure some of them are just stuck in building with massive hordes of zombies laying seich on the buildings the soldiers are occupying...
In real life, once the very first zombie case pops up. The government will be up their asses.
But then again in TWD, anybody who dies becomes a zombie anyways. So it's basically and endless fight.
In the case of a zombie infestation, the front line is wherever the military wants it to be. The zombie horde will obligingly go wherever you want them to as long as you make enough noise. A Zombie here or there isn't a threat. As noted, Lee was able to outrun them with an untreated leg wound following a car accident - unless you've got gray hair and use a walker, it wouldn't be that hard to keep your distance.
It's also not going to take that long to figure out what causes zombies; it's either that guy that just died, or the guy slowly shambling around trying to bite people - both can be solved by either staying away from dead people, or shooting them in the face.
The whole "everybody got a weapon and shot each other shtick" doesn't make much sense either. A sizeable number of Americans already own firearms, the figures of self-reported ownership among adults have ranged between 40 - 50+% for the past two decades, which kinda constitutes an armed response right off the bat. That tradition potentially goes on even longer, it was Admiral Yamamoto that famously said of the United States "there'll be a rifle behind every blade of grass" prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor... and it's worth mentioning that we didn't just up and start killing each other off in droves during past emergencies.
Numbers stopped being much of a factor with the invention of stuff like machine guns or accurate artillery which fire single shells that can kill everything in an area near the size of a football field at ranges of well over 20 miles. Human wave attacks went the way of the dodo for a reason, and that was with guys who could run and shoot back. There's nothing a zombie horde can do.
Likewise with tanks, zombies can't even chip the paint and a tank won't even need to waste ammunition on the zombies, the crew can just crush zombies under the treads.
first of all you have to remember that blast that will kill a human is not always a kill on a zombie, and when a horde of literately millions of zombies won't take much damage from artillery do to the zombies being so tightly packed, and then you might be thinking millions of zombies? lol it will never come to that, and I say it most likely will (if it ever happened) and lets face it, most people won't survive the zombie apocalypses... I would expect at least 8 out of every 10 person dying for one reason or the other (not all of them would become zombies of cause)
and how will you outrun a zombie horde that comes at you from all directions, and lets not forget the fact that when you are totally out of breath and puking do to the fact that you pushed your self way over your limit the zombie horde is still shambling after you, and how long can you keep it up? because the zombies don't need food, water or sleep, and a zombie won't need to rest...
and sure a tank will be mowing down zombies like there would be no tomorrow, until it runs of out gas and will be 100% surrounded and the soldiers inside would either die from starvation or a bullet to the brain...
Tightly packing together isn't a defense against artillery it's a liability, this is the same mistake the author of WWZ made and it basically shows that the guy doesn't understand how artillery works. All that'll happen when they tightly pack together is that more of them end up dead from each individual shell fired at them... especially since the rounds are detonated in the air against squishies to ensure a wider spread of shrapnel (it also means that shrapnel's coming from above). Overpressure/underpressure effects will turn a brain to goo through open holes in the face (mouth, nose, ears), tear limbs and heads off of torsos, etc. Zombies aren't made of steel and concrete, and artillery punches holes in that just fine.
Seriously, take a look at a picture of the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme sometime, it didn't so much as leave the trees standing. You can still see the shell craters produced by artillery in the landscape nearly 100 years after the fact. Artillery's been the premier killer in war before, during, and since: during WWI the British pegged artillery alone as being responsible for over 50% of all war deaths, that trend continued into WWII... even against an intelligent enemy that knows to take cover from it and can move at better than a walking pace, the fact is that artillery's already proven it's capable of killing millions.
Diseases which spread farthest do so because they're hard to detect and/or have asymptomatic carriers, i.e. the infected can pass for uninfected. Things like the flu are airborne, a person infected with HIV can pass for someone that isn't, and so on. Zombies offer none of those, they're obvious.
A modern MBT has an operating range of a couple hundred miles with a top speed of around 40 MPH (and they pretty much never operate alone). They can go out, kill zombies to their heart's content, head back, and leave the zombies in the dust. Hell, they can use the tanks themselves as fortifications when they're not out killing stuff (assuming they don't have any other fortifications for some bizzare reason). Just park them end-to-end to make an impenetrable wall of armor the zombies can't get through whenever they need to resupply. As the saying goes when it comes to tanks "Without mobility, a pillbox, without weapons, a bunker".
That wasn't what I was trying to say - I agree with you that it's unlikely the people in the cities would be killing each other for food and supplies within a week, although based on your assessment of the zombie capabilities we may have to somehow handwave in armed and intelligent insurgents to reach Kirkman's world. I was trying to say that with Kirkman zombies, securing an area means both establishing a perimeter and ensuring that anyone who dies from any cause within that perimeter is destroyed - and with the implied concentrations of refugees in the cities, that would be a huge task that would require armed and willing citizens to make it work. I took the fact that the comic showed loads of guns in the store instead of people's hands meant that the Atlantans weren't prepared for a scenario in which everyone needs to fight the walkers - maybe people and the authorities worked under normal rules for too long (I don't know Georgian gun laws, I'm assuming there would be waiting periods and background checks the government would be unwilling to relax in a situation of civil unrest). If the store was full because all the people who needed guns and ammo to fight the walkers already had them, then we're going to have an even harder time understanding how the world of the Walking Dead came to be.
you dont need to OUTRUN a zombie horde, just walk at a slightly fast pace and they will be miles away in a few hours, if it was the 28 days later zombie/rage infected then you would have no chance (thats why in reality they are scarier) but a zombies only advantage over a human is its harder to kill than a normal human.
Let me just say I hate this thread. It's boring and tries to apply barely researched military tactics onto a fictional medium. It's ignorance versus the supernatural. That said, I really want to plug Simon Pegg's essay on what StalkingHead just said.
Zombies aren't fast as a rule. Pegg states that the "rage infected" are inferior because "...the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable."
Full link here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/04/television-simon-pegg-dead-set
With individual or small groups of dead people, it actually wouldn't be that difficult even if there was no one onsite that could safely keep them from reanimating; just advise people to stay away from corpses (which shouldn't be that difficult since most people have a natural aversion to corpses anyway) until onsite security/law enforcement/military got there to put it down - they already advise you to do that with dangerous people; don't approach, call the police, etc. Sure, it'd be disruptive to the daily routine when somebody dies, but it'd be quite manageable.
Typically speaking (atleast in the south, though it wouldn't surprise me if it was true for the majority of states), there's no waiting period on atleast rifles or shotguns and potentially handguns, depending on state. Likewise, background checks aren't necessarily required at gun shows.
Regardless, I'd attribute unlooted gun stores to the proprietors not wanting to forfeit what is both their livelihood and means of defense. I remember from my time in the Army this was more or less the case during the whole Y2K scare; our unit's priority was to defend the armory in case somebody tried to loot it (there was the concern that the armory door would unlock and/or the alarm would go off once the New Year rolled around), so in addition to having a few squads of riflemen on watch, we had a couple of .50 cal machine guns plopped near the entrances to the building along with signs and security tape that basically said we had the right to shoot people dead if they crossed it. Damn, that was a really depressing New Year's.
while i agree that a true zombie is slow, i have watched enough films and thought about surviving a zombie apocalypse enough to conclude that not only would a zombie apocalypse never happen (unless millions of people across the world were almost simultaneously turned into zombies) but a zombie is basically one of the least dangerous predators on the planet, not only are most people physically superior (reflexes, speed, agility) almost everyone is mentally superior and that is of course the only reason we are at the top of the food chain, take that away and we are useless (like a zombie)
OK, I get where you're coming from there. I imagine when things get desperate people won't been lining up politely with their money, and the owner's not going to be overly interested in staying open for business as usual.
I know that the main reason the shambling horde overruns civilisation is for thematic reasons, and that the author wants to tell a story about people having to fend for themselves/operate in groups where personal trust is absolutely critical - and thanks Master of Aeons for the link to Simon Pegg's article on just how thematically important the shambling is.