FAE should deal with them nicely for instance.

 the only fatal shot that would kill the zombie is a head shot,that disrupted brain function(George Romero "night of the living dead"type zombies,which the book uses).The book portrays the military defending a choke point in yonkers against the migrating mass of dead from NYC...literally millions of them...i think mr.brooks was too brief in his description of the battle,but the outcome,given the circustances,was very plausable.

In the book "World War Z" at a battle called Yonkers between the U.S. military and a whole lot of Zombies, is the author correct when he says that massed fire from tanks, Artillery, helicopters, and planes on a packed crowd of zombies would have, at best, minimal effect and that the military would be defeated?

  
   I have yet to see a Zombie flick where the Zombies were proficient at using PRGs or ATGMs or any sort of general AT strategy.  Why would the tanks have to bother shooting?   60tons at 35 mph is > than your average horde of zombies.

 

Aside from that, while the clasical Zombie has to take some trauma to the brain I'd say the cuncussions and overpressure from rocket and artillery fire impacting in the midst of their Zombie horde would go a long way to turning their zombie brains to mush.   

 

If all else fails, fire and more fire.  The military is generally pretty good at burning things up.

 

This is part of the reason why I prefer Zombie hordes over alien invasions.  Humans have a solid technical and tactical advantage

 

As long as we are going Zombie hunting, why not MASER the little pests?  Firehosing them with  focused radio beams until their heads explode is FUN!

 

 

Herald

Improved Conventional Munitions. Need the discussion even progress past that point? It is essentially the same question we faced in Korea with human waves of Chinese, but this time only headshots work. Artillery is still the solution, and now we have much better options than we had in Korea. "HEF" DPICM is the primary US Army combat artillery round. Normally not used in urbanized scenarios, but this isn't exactly a normal scenario. Beyond that, there are Mk.19 40mm machineguns/automatic grenade launchers can be mounted on any vehicle from a humvee on up, or fired from a tripod.  If all of that doesn't count as a "headshot," just because the author is a dork, then you could just use C-130 cargo planes, and drop daisy cutters. Since the standoff fuse detonates them well above ground level it should definitely count. Personally I'd say the author is an idiot. I take the view of zombies expressed in the FPS game Quake : "That which is already dead cannot die. But it can be blown to bloody kibbles."

I've heard the MLRS nicknamed "The grid-square destroyer" because an MLRS strike can purportedly cover an entire 1km x 1km map quare with DPICM bomblets. If zombies were massed at a density of only one zombie per square meter, there would be 1,000,000 zombies in that area. There is no deficiency in the capacity of modern militaries to destroy large numbers quickly. Real wars are harder because the enemy is hard to find and/or shooting back. An unarmed "human wave" can be disposed of easily by any number of means. After reading the synopsis of the book on Wikipedia I must conclude that the author has completely no idea about military capability.

 

Even low tech -- hopelessly primitive 3rd world low tech -- militaries could achieve significant effects with options such as trenches filled with burning fuel, flamethrowers, IEDs, etc. More advanced 3rd world militaries with actual artillery would be even more effective even with conventional high explosive rounds - it just takes more of them and longer to do the same damage that ICM does. Note that artillery does not simply make a big boom, but physically sheds unprotected flesh with thousands of tiny splinters. Since the zombie hoard is presumably not taking cover to minimize the effects of such splinters, even ground bursts would be fairly effective. Airbursts would be even more so but require a fair degree of proficiency. Since the zombies are not shooting back it is not necessary to use indirect fire which requires a high degree of skill to be effective -- direct fire is fine. If the zombie hoard closes with the artillery unit, an option is HE rounds with time fuses dialed down to the minimum time, basically turning the howitzers into 155mm shotguns. There is a minimum range which if the hoard was able to reach would require the artillery be either moved or abandoned, but the numbers destroyed up to that point would be huge Also, though a theoretical zombie hoard would be able to overcome conventional countermobility measures such as concertina wire or barbed wire entanglements by simply climbing over the zombies entangled in the obstacle, arranging such defenses in depth would deplete the horde as more and more of the zombies became part of the landscape. Once immobilized the zombies could be wiped out at leisure. Even if these techniques didn't completely wipe out a zombie hoade, either because not every single one was killed by DPICM or cluster bomb bomlets or artillery, or because a flaming trench was eventually overwhelmed by bodies or whatever, it should at least thin their numbers enough that simple marksmanship would be sufficient to finish the rest off.

 

The following is a side trip from this discussions' main topic of military intervention in a zombie plague, but I feel compelled to point out that the author's lack of epedemiological understanding is mind boggling. Compared to a disease such as pandemic flu, a zombie virus would be easily and quickly contained. Simple biological spread from one person to another that requires such direct and obvious contact with the infected individual as a physical attack that wounds the victim has a number of consequences for a disease. It means that the number of people who are infected before the onset of the disease becomes obvous is negligible, unlike HIV. Also, the victim's behavior will cause people to avoid the person and report them to the authorities. It actually makes the disease easier to contain than conventional diseases because the victim does not require treatment by the medical personnel or family members which exposes additional people to conventional diseases. Since the victims are physically marked by the attack they can be readily identified and either quarantined or premptively killed.

  One might think that buttoned up armored vehicles moving at moderate speeds thru a herds of zombies that are hemmed into city streets might do good work as they trundle back and forth. Shooting could  be confined to those undead that were unpulped in the process. Local officials would likely welcome solutions that don't level their towns, and clean up would only require the fire department's hoses and some loaders and dump trucks. Let's try to keep FEMA outta this.

   i dont own WWZ but i do own the author's first zombie book "the Zombie survival guide".  there is a little too much military analysis going on here, this whole zombie idea just started after 9/11 when the author (mel brooks' son!) wrote the zombie survival guide as a joke (making fun of all of the "survival experts" who started pedaling their BS "run for the hills!" manuals to the fear stricken, sometimes sheep-like American public).

   the next book was just a logical progression from this, its not like the guy is trying to pass himself off as a psuedomilitary expert like we do (or at least i do!).  if the zombie horde cant take on a few tanks and choppers, the story will be pretty short and dull dont you think?

The Battle of Yonkers was basically the author's way of showing that using Iraq-style conventional tactics wouldn't work on zombie hordes.  The point he makes is that the troops panicked when zombies began getting up again after taking point blank SAW fire and even thermobaric bombs.  There was also the fact that the hordes just kept coming and were made up of people that the troops were intended to protect.  It's one thing to shoot somebody with an AK who's trying to kill you; it's different when your target looks like the girl next door--or if it is the girl next door.

 

Implausible? Yeah, maybe.  I didn't think his idea of a Jewish civil war in Israel was very accurate either.  Not to mention what two or three AC-130s would do to a zombie horde.  But like someone just said, it'd be a short book if the military just wiped out the hordes with no trouble.  Brooks was going for the Dawn of the Dead thing, not Shaun of the Dead (where the zombie outbreak was brought under control in less than 72 hours).

 

Still, I liked his battle sequences with the old Napoleonic-style firing lines and "orc blade" melee weapons, and his descriptions of how cities held out (Ford Field in Detroit was great). There were some parts in this book that gave me genuine goosebumps--like the part where the Sears Tower was literally filled with zombies, or the zombies moving around the ocean floor, or the guy who fights across America only to kill himself when he liberates his own house. Spooky.