Most critically he underestimates military logistics. And there's no way people wouldn't take a zombie outbreak seriously. Just look at SARS.

Hi, I'm new here, and I realize this is probably a dead thread by now, but having read the book, I'd like to throw in my 2 cents. I'm probably far less knowledgeable than many of the people around here about strategy and tactics and such, but I'm willing (and eager) to learn.

The book is not primarily about the military vs. zombies, in fact it's more of a sociology "fable" of sorts, set against a zombie holocaust backdrop. There's more stories about civilian survivors, political and technical experts than military personnel, the book itself is organized in "survival vignettes", that is, survivors are supposedly interviewed by the author of the book, many years after the end of the war, to collect the "Human" side of the story after compiling a factbook about the conflict for the U.N.

According to the book, the epidemic started in China, possibly triggered by the flooding caused by the 3 gorges dam. The Chinese hid the incident for some reason (it might have been their doing in some way) with massive army deployement which was widely interpreted as a dissident crackdown. Chinese dissidents (in the book anyway) are often used as a source of black market organs, some of these were infected and ended up going all around the world to waiting patients (which is how the first cases spread out of China). Intel agencies all around the world were confident in the "dissident crackdown" interpretation, the CIA in particular was weakened by the "last brushfire war" after taking the brunt of the blame for the intelligence failures (it is implied Brooks is talking about Iraq). The U.S. army was also at an all time manpower shortage, and of course, heads in the brass rolled from the aforementioned failure.

Most leaders and intel personnel thought the stories about the rising dead as some sort of counterintelligence ploy, or perhaps the product of hysteria, in other words there was total disbelief and denial until the problem got too large to be swept under the carpet. The exception to this rule was Israel, which took the Mossad's warnings seriously and responded by screening refugees and building a massive perimeter wall with hardpoints and antipersonnel weapons. The American response to Israeli advice was the creation of "Alpha teams", SOCOM fireteams deployed to contain small outbreaks all across the U.S. And it worked, for awhile. A corporation developed an "African rabies" (the popular name for the zombie virus, since the first massive outbreaks outside China started in South Africa) vaccine called "Phalanx", which didn't work but relaxed the public.

Eventually the combination of a virtually token government response, ignorance and apathy by the public, and misinformation by mass media outlets caused the disease to spread like wildfire. By the time of Yonkers, there were hotspots all across the world, and all across America. Most of the eastern seaboard was overrun with hordes of the undead, we're talking about millions of zombies on the New York area alone.

The army chose to make a stand at Yonkers to rally national morale and reassure the public, and they expected an easy win against a hundred thousand zombies. It was expected to be a quick battle where overwhelming fire would crush the zombies, much like in Iraq, but easier since the zombies are dumb and packed tight together. They issued enough munitions for a brief, overwhelming encounter, not a battle of attrition that may well have lasted for days (which was what they were against). The latest and greatest tech was issued, land warrior systems, NBC gear (the virus wasn't airborne but they looked awesome on T.V.), and supposedly there was almost one reporter per every 3 servicemen.

The army used a river as a natural barrier and held a bridge using it as a killzone. The initial artillery barrage was devastating, but it was wasted as there were relatively few zombies. Then the trickle began to turn into a flood, and eventually the artillery ran out of shells. Then they used automatic grenade launchers and heavy MGs, which created a "woodchipper" effect, but these too ran out of ammo eventually. So the units started to use AT weaponry (by now thousands of zombies were coming across the river, as they don't need air) to little effect.

To make matters worse, the area behind the frontline was not secured: some infected people were locked up in buildings because their relatives thought the disease had (or would have) a cure, some of them were in the sewers. Jolted awake by the gunfire, they started attacking the back of the line, and thanks to the live feed system, the grunts on the ground thought they were being overwhelmed from all sides (there was a live satellite feed showing a few million more zombies advancing from N.Y.C. to reinforce the Yonkers horde), and to top it off, sometimes rounds grazed the skulls and it appeared like they didn't go down when headshot. Some broke fire discipline, morale collapsed and they were overrun. All of this happened live on mass media (everyone in America was watching).

In the end to prevent the horde from overruning Washington, JSOWs and fuel air bombs were used on the bridge and the horde itself. The battle was actually a stalemate between the U.S. army and the Zombies, and the casualty rate greatly favored the army, but the army being overrun and torn to pieces by hordes of zombies as far as the camera could capture crushed national morale (like Mogadishu, only like, 150 times worse I guess), keep in mind by the time the FAE were used, the reporters had long since fled the scene. The plan backfired, the people panicked, militias and gangs rose, people fled their homes (and spread the disease even further), and that caused "the great panic".

I suppose if the military purposefully left their planes, ammunition, technology, fear, personalities and brains at home than the above could sort of happen.

I reiterate... the only scientifically realistic zombie holocaust is an airborne (or similar) virus that is near 100% or 100% effective with a significant delay.

 

I'm sure the book is a great read though I don't want to read it as much after this thread.

I love how people have criticized the book without ever reading it.  Granted, the people who have read the book are doing a poor job at telling exactly why Yonkers was over-run.

 

The real reason why Yonkers was over run had nothing to do with the modern guns that were used, it had to do with Fear.

 

What does artillery and napalm do other then brutally kill its targets?  It scares the living crap out of the surviving targets.  But what if your targets can not be frightened?  What if your targets will take a blast from an artillery round that blows off both its legs and an arm, and yet it still claws its way towards you with his one remaining arm, still eager to win?

 

The Fear that is generally installed on an enemy after an impressive display of fire power was not effective on the zombies, which caused it to bounce back into the military's face.  After seeing the zombies react to the the impressive artillery strike by simply getting back up, the human emotions overtook the forces and they went into extreme panic.  The zombies never took over until this panic was installed.  Once everyone went into a panic, the zombies got through.

 

Also, according to an article I read, Max Brooks studied military warfare and weapons and was trained by the US Army in ballistics before writing this book.  The guy knew his stuff.  But none of you would realize that without reading the book.

 

So next time, read the book, and then share your comments.

The bodies and brains of zombies would not be subject to the concussive blast effect of high explosives due to the fact that most of the liquid inside zombie bodies has congealed and would take very little damage from blast waves. That was discussed as a reason in the book. Also in his earlier work "the zombie survival guide", Brooks goes into detail about the virus (solenum) transforming the brain into a completely new, self-sufficient organ. Therefore it is unknown how the effects of high explosives would have on a zombies head.

 

Also the idea of running over zombies with armored vehicles works to a point, but when the are millions of zombies bunched together for miles and miles even the brute force of a tank may no longer be able to push forward. As well, eventually all vehicles break down, or need to be refueled or reloaded, which would be impossible with dozens of zombies clinging to every part of each vehicle. Even driving would soon become impossible, with zombies scrambling all over your vehicle, obscuring viewing ports and other visual sensors.

Cripes.

Given enough time the same useless arguments get wheeled out to try and win by attrition. It's like dealing with conspiracy theorists.

It doesn't matter if the zombies are proof against "concussion". Blast is a remarkably inefficient way of causing casualties. As a result, the primary casualty-causing effect of any high explosive weapon is primary (the casing and pre-formed fragments) and secondary (dirt, stones, bits of other people) fragmentation. If you are close enough to be killed by blast you are close enough to be blown into far more pieces than is conducive to survival and certainly more pieces than is needed for any form of mobility.

While the effects of blast is a poorly understood field, metal fragments travelling up to a couple of kilometres per second shouldn't be quite so confusing.

As for the need to read the book, I think by now the onus is on the supporters to intelligently argue the merits of the book rather than just demand that the book be read.

Another book cites a statistic that only one in 10,000 bullets fired in Vietnam found its mark. Consider on top of that the statistics of casualties in conventional warfare where small arms casualties make up between a quarter and a half of all those wounded or killed. The rest is handled by artillery, airpower and traps/mines.  In this environment, the enemy has projectile weapons that they can use to interfere with the defender's shooting, they are running and taking cover and generally being a hard target. Compare that with a slow moving mass that doesn't really bother to take cover and put that up against machine guns, automatic rifles, artillery, air power and sundry other weapons and you need another vector for the Zombies to win or even get close. The easiest way (and apparently the one that the author has chosen*) is to make the military stupid. Really, really, stupid. And panicky. and hundreds of other negative aspects that people project onto the military and that the military spends a great deal of time training out of people.

*He is not alone. Pretty much every hero-orientated film or book in existence dumbs down everyone else in order to make the hero look better. There is also a large movement dedicated to portraying the military in the worst possible light or ascribing them civilian traits that even the greenest recruit in a modern western military will have mostly got shot of by the time he leaves initial training.

Last time I was involved in a zombie apocalypse (taking place in Sweden as usual) we were told to scrap the mentality of taking all zombies out in one chokepoint. 

"You have armor protection, speed, maneuverability and firepower. You don't want to risk panic while facing millions of zombies in one place when there is a way to proceed in a far more subtle and low-risk manner", said our Colonel. Soon after he got infected by a zombie-feeding raven crapping in his mouth while he was sunbathing, but that's another story.

 

We suffered severe combat stress lossess in infantry soldiers that had personally experienced the "one chokepoint, one big fight" -approach. The sight of once-fallen zombie that got up again was quite stressful when witnessed in quantities. There were also a couple of incidents where a private would recognize some of his/her relatives in the zombie crowd. Not helping. (Though I have heard that it was a nice curiosity to spot former ABBA -members amongst the living dead.)

 

So we tried another way to look at it. We set up practically zombie-immune defencive fortifications and sent hunter-killer teams out for few hour destroy missions. Those teams comprised of one Leo 2 -tank and three wheeled APC's. The tank acted as a life insurance to relieve stress in infantry squads inside the APC's. The team always maintained visual contact with each other. Instead of using massive chokepoints, we tried both to destroy controlled lured-out zombie masses with mortar fire, or individual zombies with rifle fire from the hatches in the APC's. We had a basic rule of never letting a zombie touch our vehicles, crushing z's with the tank excluded.

 

The Leo 2 was there for no other reason than being able to tow broken down APC's back to safety, plus letting the infantry guys know they had an emergency exit available. One sortie would typically take out a few hundred zombies, plus being able to rescue still-living civilians on APC rooftops - yet maintaining defencive combat abilities thanks to the tank and side hatches. Combat stress levels dropped significantly after this method got adopted. Some troops even considered it as being fun.

 

I remember one time the Leo 2 broke down inside some Swedish suburb. The APC's were all carrying civilians on them, so the tank crew buttoned up and waited for help for 11 hours before being towed back by other tanks from another base. The Swedish crew found out a natural way to amuse themselves and relieve stress while waiting.

 

Mikko

 

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