How should I deploy zombies into combat?

Okay, taking advantage of post-Halloween clearance sales, I’ve recently picked up a battalion of Romero-class zombies. Mostly slow, stupid, ravenous creatures, but my elite team of researchers and goons has instituted a training regime to increase their combat effectiveness. We hope to have almost one fifth of them able to use a club as a weapon, at least as long as it’s strapped to their arm, within eight months.

In any case, I’ve begun to consider the problems of deploying the ghouls operationally, especially in remote areas that I can’t feasibly just have them dumped out the back of a rental van.

Air delivery, of course, has been a method of interest for me. Though this presents it’s own problems: zombies, while much more resilient to injury than living humans, are not invulnerable, so they can’t just be dropped out of a plane at ten thousand feet. But by the same token, they’re stupid enough that I fear they’d simply become hopelessly tangled in the rigging if you tried to drop them like paratroopers. Not to mention the chance of them being rendered immobile by a hard landing.

Encapsulating zombies for airdrop in a SKAD survival kit-like container is a possibility, with the added benefit that they could be carried by fighter-bombers, possibly even as a bizarre form of air support. And I know some research has been done in Europe with balloon delivery of undead.

But I’d really like to consult with the Straight Dope brain trust on the subject, and get some more ideas. Anyone have any thoughts?

There’s a well known problem with consulting with a * brain * trust on the subject of zombies.
The thing about zombies is that they’re self-replicating. So your best bet is just to leave a few crates of zombies in the path of your invading army marked “Do not open, valuable scientific specimen, bio hazard” or possibly just “booze”. Before you know it, some cretin will have popped the lid and events will proceed in a way familiar to horror movie fans everywhere.

Of course, you now have a territory populated with zombies with automatic weapons. This may not be the result you really wanted.

Probably better discussed in IMHO, rather than General Questions. Moved.

samclem Moderator, GQ

You point at the enemy and tell your zombie troops, “Brains are that way!” Duh.

I unsuccessfully looked for a site referencing that drogue/skid deployment method they sometimes use to land heavy vehicles and equipment out of cargo planes without quite landing the plane (they based a stunt on this in the James Bond movie The Living Daylights). While doing so, I found an even cooler deployment system. Fast, cheap, and sure to attract curious onlookers to become your zombies’ first victims.

I’d deploy them in an old folks home. The staff probably wouldn’d even notice them since they kind of walk like old people anyway. And the old people aren’t going to put up much of a fight, they’ll be turned into zombies themselves, and they’ll have a chance to get up and walk around again.

Win/win/win.

Zombies, as a rule, make horrible strike team troopers, which is what you sound like you want. If you want precise destruction, zombies ain’t gonna help you. You’d be better off channeling the raw necrotic energy into making a single powerful servile vampire and sending him in as a special forces operative.

Split your forces into thirds (taking care to keep individual bio-units whole). Place 1/3 at a choke point, split another third in half and deploy on the enemies flanks, to keep them from flanking you. Then use the final 1/3 in a low-level airdrop, I wouldn’t worry about 'chutes an lines, your main intent is to sow chaos, terror and keep the enemy moving towards your main force. Get the enemy fighting instead of thinking and it’s all over.

bon appétit

You could just use them as cannon fodder. Put your zombie legions out front, give torches to the human legions behind them, and the zombies will retreat from the torches…towards you enemy.

But really, zombies are way overrated as supernatural troops go. What you really want is legions of trolls. They regenerate 3 hp/melee round, and can only be finally killed by fire or acid.

If you must go with undead, look at some of the premium lines, like wights, which can only be harmed by silver or magic weapons.

Why is this even a question? The obvious answer is a glider. Put some current technology radio control in the thing and tow them near to the target area. Release them at altitude and let some guy in Missouri land the thing remotely on some road or in some field.

No, the viral concept it where it’s at. Treat zombies at bio-weapons and drop them in groups of three or four in different places. Maybe skydrop them in boxes with autorelease mechanisms that fire on impact. A thousand bombers over Cologne leads to 2000-4000 zombie infestations, each of them self-supporting and enhancing, throughout the target location.

Not only does it reduce combat strength but it demolishes enemy morale. Like all bio-weapons, though, clean up remains a problem.

Another thought, instead training them to use clubs, invest in helmets. All research I’ve found show the gen-1 through gen-5 zombies are all vulnerable to head trauma. I found traces of a gen-6 zombie though it appears classified. Strange.

The key is to treat them as Viruses or bio-weapons. You want the biggest bang for your buck without wasting your resources. The best idea so far was sending them up against the Old folks home. Using only about 4-6 zombies you could easily amass more zombies from those victims without using your initial supplies too much. So send a few in- take over the old folks homes, and then pull out your initial zombies. Keep repeating this tactic- basically taking small groups of zombies and deploying them into high population dense areas with low chances of your zombies being stopped- creating basically “Zombie pockets” to use to spread the infection- you want several of these pockets all building up before you even did anything like trying to send them out against armed troops/police/crazy hicks waiting for the South to rise again…

Also- I’d introduce psychological warfare- I’d repeat the zombie-Old-Folks home tactics- but with Day care centers. Now we’ve got a possibly more mobile army of scary little children zombies that can more easily be concealed, and are already used to biting…Then we move on to orphanages and get us some “Zombabies”. These can be deployed as basically portable instant zombies- you can throw them at people in hopes of creating an infection. Finally, once we’ve got pockets building up- we go for the big money- Zombies deployed in Malls and apartment buildings in hopes of going door to door and creating maximum amounts of disease as possible.

The only problem is all these tactics would work for basically taking down a single city. The Government should just quarantine and declare it a wasteland to be safe.

So maybe you should start somewhere isolated, and spread the zombies through zoonotic reserves- dogs, wolves, deer, raccoons, basically infect the woods and see what turns up?

I prefer the term crude strike team troopers, myself, with a secondary area-denial capability. Their resistance to fatal injury, innate horror by their presence, and feral ardor helping to make up for their shortcomings as infantry.

And I can’t believe the helmet idea didn’t occur to me already—and I could probably dispense with chin straps, too, if I just stick 'em on with epoxy. It might even help out the zombie grenadier development (some progress has been made, to be sure, but…well, let’s just say I’m glad I invested in the rubber training weapons).

I’m also curious about the possibilities of amphibious deployment. Obviously, I can just dump ghouls off a ship near a coastline as the tide is going in, and let them do the rest, but what if I need to get fancy? How low and slow would they need to be dropped from the air if I wanted to deploy them into water without chutes, without pulping them?

Why bother? Zombie airdrops are expensive, difficult, and distressingly likely to be noticed. If you’ve zombie, then you’ve access to zombie blood. Take a sample, hand it to a thoroughly brainwashed or blackmailed young man, and have him walk into enemy territory with a syringe in his pocket. Or a pill full of zombie gore, if that stuff can survive human stomach acids. Once your Suicide Zombie is on target, he doses himself and waits. If you want, you can have many Suicide Zombies.

Great thing about this is that your Suicide Zombie, before he turns, will become very ill. Ill people get taken to hospitals, and hospitals are both vital infrastructure and loaded with potential zombie-snacks.

The take-away is: If you want to fight like someone with a modern military and sophisticated deployment systems, you’ve better options than zombies. (Do you have something against ground-to-air missiles?) Zombies are fantastic as weapons of assymetric warfare - so use them accordingly.

This is full of win, and I never type “full of win”.

I’m curious to see which of our proposals would be optimal if we all had our own zombie armies and nations and basically tried these various strategies vs. each other… My Zombabies might be able to take your Suicide Zombie Recruit- what person willingly wants to die like that? And if you go into hospitals- well there’s plenty of equipment to try and take out that Zombie 0 first…
It’d be interesting to run simulations somehow.

Why not a zombie bomb? Combine zombie blood and birdshot or metal filings in a little bomb that doesn’t hurt much, and you can create dozens of potential zombies in one go. No volunteers necessary.

As a bonus, zombie blood looks a lot like bomb victim blood (in my limited experience). You can probably make it look like Not Biological Warfare long enough for the first wave of zombies to cause quite a stir.

I’d be wary of the zombie blood angles. Blood and fluids are already classified as infectious and modern soldiers come equipped with NBC gear. You might get some civilians but they don’t fight, of course chaos and terror would be high so that’s good. Additionally, once the zed blood genie is airborne who knows what mutations might occur? If you’re going scorched-earth I wouldn’t worry about it if but you’re intending on occupying the territory?

You develop it, I’d buy it. Maybe use the Harpoon engine or better yet Total War.