History Headscratchers / WorldWarZ

** 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).

*** Particularly stupid because the Lobotomizer as described is basically just an E-tool, which is a real tool actually issued by the U.S. Army already. While it's mostly a shovel (entrenching tool) it is also quite an effective melee weapon that can be readily swung at the head.

*** Still overlooking that not everyone is a marksman and they train people to aim for the centre of mass because headshots are hard. It's not a problem if you're only going against one zombie, but there's rarely ever just one zombie heading towards you, so people freaking out because this is a horrifying situation, combined with adreline, and you're not going to have a whole lot of people who can pull off decent shots to the head fast enough.

*** This wasn't a snowball effect. This was apparently the brass inexplicably being stupid at a level just barely above "hey, we don't need actual ''guns'' to fight the zombies, right?" Apparently nobody in the military bothered to try firing arty at the Zacks and recording the effects, even though artillery usually involves spotters who do precisely that. Nobody figured out the whole "chain swarm" thing, even though they would've had plenty of examples. Nobody did aerial recon, even though Zacks have no response to planes. In short, this was a bunch of screw ups in a fashion that would be impossible for anything vaguely resembling a competent military. There's things in there which are sheer author fiat, like Land Warrior conveniently broadcasting the attack on a soldier to all the other soldiers, because they inexplicably forgot to clear out the houses before setting up, which violates basic procedure. Someone below already pointed out the problem with Brooks' idea of "Shock and Awe".

** "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? Conventional 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.

** 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.

*** 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.

*** Except the very idea that they thought it was a success would have required them to have a level of competence far less than the average RUSE player. By virtue of not using some of the most important advantages available to them: namely *yo quiero ABSOLUTE AERIAL SUPERIORITY* that would allow air support and air recon (and things like satellites) to pop in and check on things no matter what. Which would have immediately revealed things like the Chaim Swarms *days* if not weeks/months before the preparation for Yonkers, and which renders most of the usual justifications used for it absolutely indefensible. It matters not a damn bit about lack of deterrence, if anything the lack of deterrence would be a godsend to humanity simply because the Zombies lack the survival instinct that makes humans difficult to kill, and would allow a decisive battle of annihilation if and when the resources are properly used. The history of the Japanese military in World War Two and that of the Madhists in the Sudan War are particularly good indicators of this.

*** This. There is no excuse whatsoever for not knowing about the chain swarms. NONE. ABSOLUTELY NONE. This is why Yonkers is insane on the face of it; there is no way in hell that any competent artilleryman since the invention of the modern, beyond-eyesight practice would have resorted to the bombardment of the weaker initial waves when there's an enormous, snaking, tightly packed force of millions behind it that would be far more effective. And why the very deployment of the MRLS would *mandate* FO that would detect the chain swarm coming out of NYC which would immediately result in the arty being deployed there save to prevent the overrun of a unit. Again, the idea that the military would run out of munitions is bumpkiss without further explanations, by dint of studying lovely things like actual stressors the US- and most sWestern and even modern-- logistical systems are built to cope with.

*** Cloud cover is no justification. It's only been a major historical problem for air forces due to one of the best ways to avoid enemy fire being to stay the hell *above* the problem while doing their jobs. Which cloud cover would naturally interfere with and make ineffective. There was never any magical problem coming in underneath my cloud cover for aerial technology, it's just that they were afraid of being detected and/or shot. On top of that, cloud cover's been slowly becoming more and more irrelevant as technology marches on, and even during WWII and *WWI* it was hardly an insurmountable barrier. Zombies have NO aerial or anti-aerial capabilities. Because of this, cloud cover is irrelevant; low altitude flyovers are absolutely invincible. What's more, Zombies even lack a preservation instinct that might remotely complicate things that might make a low flyover against actual sentient difficult (for instance, scattering into smaller groups, hiding, etc). There is ''no'' reason they would not have known about the Zombie swarm heading through to Yonkers well ahead of time if they bothered to use their known advantages. Furthermore, zombies are not that resilient. Outside of being capable of withstanding the pressures of the ocean floor and not being permanently killed save for head damage, they are still just tissues even if altered by Sol. We know this because of all the numerous ways zombies are successfully killed in the books. Some basic briefing from the Special Operations outfits and info sharing would have rendered their resilience to damage (such as it is) effectively moot.

** The slow incubation period is actually an ''asset'' to the disease, as it has a 100% mortality rate. If it spreads fast and still had a 100% mortality rate, it'd die out almost instantly since it's host won't be able to spread it farther than a walking distance. The fact that it needs up to and possibly over 24 hours to fully turn means that it can get across the globe, as an infected person can do a hell of a lot in the 24 hours before he/she turns. Also, while it spreads by bites, it technically spreads by fluidic contact, meaning victims are walking biohazards.

*** The fact that they're all happening at once is simply UpToEleven meets (the popular interpretation of) MurphysLaw, in order to facilitate the fact that this is a story wherein literally everything that can go wrong when dealing with a ZombieApocalypse ''does'' go wrong. Hence, a ZombieApocalypse.

** Ultimately, I think this is just some AcceptableBreaksFromReality that you have to deal with in order to accept the scenario of a ZombieApocalypse to begin with. A purely "realistic" approach to a Zombie Apocalypse would probably end up not having the apocalypse get off the ground at all, since zombies are actually one of the most implausible and contradictory monsters out there and most scenarios involving them completely overrunning the earth require so many leaps of logic and things going just wrong that they're completely impossible. Basically, if you want a ZombieApocalypse, you need lots of zombies, and to get lots of zombies you have to assume that everything worked out just so in order to make sure you get lots of zombies.

*** The fact that they're all happening at once is simply UpToEleven meets (the popular interpretation of) MurphysLaw, in order to facilitate the fact that this is a story wherein literally everything that can go wrong when dealing with a ZombieApocalypse ''does'' go wrong.

** Maybe he'd barely escaped a zombie that touched his face but didn't manage to bite him, and he'd gone into the bathroom to clean himself up. He starts to wash his face, not realizing he has an open cut on his hand and residue from the virus on his skin...

** She's a BadassIsraeli with a gun who's just seen her home nation's holiest city being overrun by the zombie plague, and B-Wing contains the only hope of stopping them from killing any loved ones she might still have left in the world. Do you really think a bunch of lab geeks could ''stop'' her from joining the foray into that lab?

** Terminally ill patients aren't immune from dying from the aftermath of the world falling apart: vehicle crashes, fires, stampedes, riots, falling buildings, getting shot or attacked by panicked survivors, heart attacks. Chances were that very few were in a support group meeting at the time the apocalypse reached them anyway, and they would prioritize finding and staying with their families first. Others who were very ill to the point of immobility, they were left behind after everyone else in the hospital fled or got bitten and died a slower death of neglect.

*** Not everyone in the usual hospital has a terminal disease. Patients who were hospitalized because of, for example, a broken leg would still get attacked and so would doctors, nurses, other hospital staff, and visitors. Most people in hospitals, nursing homes, and the like would be too busy trying to escape and avoid getting bitten to notice that certain patients were being preferred over others.

** Terminally ill patients aren't immune from dying from the aftermath of the world falling apart: vehicle crashes, fires, stampedes, riots, falling buildings, getting shot or attacked by panicked survivors, heart attacks. Chances were that very few were in a support group meeting at the time the apocalypse reached them anyway. Others who were very ill to the point of immobility, they were left behind after everyone else in the hospital fled or got bitten and died a slower death of neglect.