I know the military had plans like operation gladio, which were designed to be an insurgency movement in case the communists invaded. I guess (from what little I know of the program that wasn’t turned into a false flag operation) it was designed to promote assassinations, kidnappings, sabotage, terrorism, etc. to wear down the enemy and drive him out. Insurgency against an organized invading army worked in Afghanistan with the USSR and Vietnam with the US and French, as well as tons of other countries in the 20th century. So it can’t be a bad idea.
So, according to people like Kurzweil fields like biotechnology are growing exponentially. And it seems a ‘zombie virus’ that turned the population into violent, simple minded creatures while leaving all the buildings and infrastructure intact would be a pretty good war weapon. Plus it would confuse, demoralize and terrorize your enemy while destroying his ability to maintain the civilian infrastructure of war.
So assuming it was possible to build a biological weapon that was spread by person to person contact (rather than airborne, despite airborne being more potent), and that turned people into violent crazed beings whose only goals were their own survival and spreading the infection to other non-infected beings, what would the military strategy be to take back the country in that situation?
It seems a single squad or section of soldiers in an air tight armored vehicle could easily destroy thousands of them a day. Just go to an area with high population density, build a perimeter around it so nothing can get in or out, find some bait to draw them out, then shoot them/burn them/bomb them/run them over. Wash/rinse/repeat. After most are dead, clear out the area of all dead, disinfect, and slowly move people back in.
Most zombie movies never cover this. And its a shame if you ask me. Even the movie 28 weeks later which kindof covered it had so many plot holes it was unbelievable. And the movie land of the dead tried to also, but it never really showed humans trying to take back civilization, just trying to live in their little enclave.
World War Z dealt with this, and yes basically old school style fighting of forming and line and shooting was what won the war. The problem is getting to the “we have to shoot all our infected citizens in the head” issue, how do you convince the country of that?
You let them see a real zombie attack and then how it’s countered. Americans [del]aren’t stupid[/del] have seen this in movies and require minimal training.
If we’re smart, fast and with overwhelming force. If we’re stupid, by doing nothing while congressional committees wonder if the tea stains on Obama’s birth certificate were intelligently designed, and the drooling, brainless undead will conquer us all. :smack:
It always bugged me that survivors left the mall in Day of the Dead. If I had a barricaded stronghold with presumably at least one hardware store, at least one sporting-goods store, at least one supermarket and a food court, I could stay there for years if need be. Then it becomes a matter of MacGyvering solutions to various problems, including how to get food to Andy and ammo from him.
In any case, the zombies can’t possibly move faster than modern communications, so word of the outbreak spreads far faster than the outbreak itself, giving ample time to take countermeasures.
I think it would not actually be the government doing it, it would be the populace that would do it - as was said upstream, enough of us have seen zombie movies to know what needs to be done.
Of course, all the people who object to privately owned firearms would be zombie-bait =)
I think it comes down to how long someone is infectious but non-symptomatic.
If within minutes they’re zombies, or have symptoms (e.g. dark veins, sunken face etc like in the movies), then eradicating them should be relatively simple.
If they can walk around for weeks with no sign that they are infected, and let’s say there’s no reliable test for infection; we’re in big trouble.
Still…I suppose you don’t attempt to infect others until you’re a zombie.
Should still be able to contain it, eventually…
Dawn of the Dead had the shopping mall, Day of the Dead had the underground government storage facility/missle base in Florida. And there were only 2 surivivors, one of whom was in her third trimester, and the entire mall was overun by zombies by then. They’d even broken down the fake wall and chased them up to the roof. Peter and Fran would have died if they stayed (which was Romero’s originial plan). There was no food court either, only a sit-down resturant and a gourmet foods shop.
Assuming you are talking about the 2002 “Dawn of the Dead” then you have a dozen people in the place. Supermarkets typically stock about enough food for their customer base for one day and are dependent on unloading dozens of trucks daily to keep up with demand. So assuming the customer base was 5, 000 people that’s roughly 5,000 people days of food. For 12 people that’s a bit over one year’s worth of food. However, much of that won’t actually last a year. The food court shops stock truly tiny quantities of food because rent is based on floor area and stock takes up floor space. Adding the food court you might have a year’s supply of food.
I think you might have seriously underestimated how little food supermarkets actually stock. I’ve worked back dock and shelf packing at supermarkets, and if the trucks stop coming for even 8 hours the shelves start to become bare. This is why panic buying in emergencies can strip even large supermarkets in a matter of hours.
But food isn’t really the big problem, it’s water. A supermarket *might *stock ten thousand litres of water. A person needs 5 litres a day, 12 people need 60 litres. That’s about 6 months worth of water. The coffee urns, toilet cisterns etc. might give you another few weeks. If you’re both lucky and clever you might be able to use the air conditioners for another few week’s worth. After that you’re in real big trouble. If you live somewhere where it rains frequently and you have some plumbing and survival experience then you might be able to catch enough water using sheets, but they decay fast exposed to the elements, so figure you can keep that up for maybe a year. More importantly, since you lack the capacity to actually store more than a few weeks water it would be a precarious existence. A drought of more than few weeks and people are going to start dying.
I’ll grant that your group could survive for a year in a supermarket. But years? Not much chance.
Well, if the grocery store sells water filters, I’d round them up and be using them to purify whatever rainwater I could collect from the dozens of tubs I’d set up on the roof. For electricity, the hardware store might sell generators, so I’d get one and make runs into the parking garage to get gasoline from the dozens of abandoned cars.
Then for Andy, rig up a catapult of some kind using rubber tubing to try to get a weight with a thousand-foot fishing line attached to him. Once he has that, he can pull over a heavier line (maybe telephone cable or clotheslines tied together) and then we’d have a cable system where we can get small quantities of concentrated food to him (Ensure shakes, perhaps) and get ammunition back. Use the generator to set up lights so we can illuminate the parking lot at night (hopefully also attracting then attention of other survivors). Andy, by all accounts an excellent shot, can make himself comfortable and spend the night hours sniping zombies. He could take out a thousand or so every night. Then he and the mall survivors should stay indoors by day to avoid water loss. Within two or three months, the zombies should be dwindling, either succumbing to “starvation” or simple decay.
Of course, if the zombies never succumb to decay, all this is moot. My point is that the situation in the movie was relatively stable and could be, with a little ingenuity, borderline comfortable. Of course, that makes for a boring movie, so to keep the plot moving, the characters have to embark on a truly stunningly ill-advised plan to bust out.
Yeah… I applaud Max Brooks for his determination to bring zombie-related fiction back to the forefront of American literature, but some of his ideas are better thought out than others. Brooks places a lot of credence in Eastern martial arts, more than is realistic in my opinion. And World War Z was much better than his Zombie Survival Guide, but every so often you’d run across something poorly thought out. However, I do think his treatment of the military in the story was fair- by using old-style rifle squares and loudspeakers to draw the zombies toward them, they managed to fight in what was really a system of mobile defenses. They picked a defensive point, slaughtered the undead for a few hours, and dashed ahead when the threat slowed. Then they picked another defensive point and made another stand.
I always occurred to me that all zombie movies heavily underestimate how well the army would handle a zombie outbreak given that…
[ul]
[li] A zombie outbreak isn’t that different to a regular contagious disease outbreak which armies are pretty well prepared for on the whole. [/li][li] Armies are pretty well supplied with zombie proof buildings.[/li][li] Depending on how invunerable the zombie-de-jour is (I mean 28-days-later “zombies” are just leary people they should be wiped out in short order), a modern army has enough munitions to wipe out ALOT of them.[/li][li] I would have thought a reguler army “NBC” suit would provide pretty good protect from zombie bites, I mean based on what I’ve seen of them you’d have a hard time biting through one of them.[/li][/ul]
Covered in the guide… bombs and other explosives kill via shrapnel and overpressure from teh actual explosion.
Neither one of which are really useful against the Walking Dead. What you end up with is a shredded mass of flesh, with bitey bits inside still needing to be “cleaned up”.
You, sir, are a dead man. You know what’s in the parking garage? Zombies. Lots of 'em.
And I haven’t seen the movie, but in terms of just “generic malls,” all the ones I’ve seen have a glass door/glass restaurant window front somewhere. Even if you have the slow-moving type of zombies, enough of them pushing up against each other can break that glass.
You just fell for the decoy. The head zombie’s far more obvious, but nobody can ever kill hi… it. When WW3 hits and the Bombs fall, the only things that’ll still be alive are cockroaches… and Keith Richards. Who’ll immediately get busy snorting cockroaches.