And you’re assuming the 120,000 military personnel are immune to becoming zombies themselves? What happens when a unit becomes infected?
The military aren’t massed North Korea DMZ style waiting for the go order. They aren’t going to be buttoning up bases until fairly far into the situation. And they will probably be taking injured into those bases at first, until they realize that these aren’t sick people with a super-flu that makes them delirious. These are actual infectious corpses that are rising from the dead with a hunger for living flesh.
I think you’re over-estimating how ready the military are for an unexpected invasion of tens to hundreds of thousands of bullet resistant people. Couple that with wave after wave, defections (as people rush home to their families), bitten soldiers turning at the worst possible time, disrupted communications, and perhaps disrupted command. I’m not seeing a problem with the military collapsing into a few heavily defended bases.
No, it wasn’t just you - there was discussion (here and on “The Talking Dead”) about how there should have been zombies in the cars, not just dead bodies.
A note about the military vs. zombies - we don’t know yet how all these people became zombies in the first place - it seems likely that soldiers wouldn’t have been immune from whatever happened, so they may not have had a lot of soldiers available to fight the waves of new zombies.
I’m with Hentor 100% on the military thing. And I literally laughed out loud when I read:
We’re not talking about some kind of weaksauce cite like wikipedia. No, this is the most iron-clad of cites: World War Z!
I can’t offer a cite like World War Z :D, but I can cite Katrina. Our military couldn’t get water to people in Louisiana in under a week.
To think that they’d react fast enough to quell the spread of the zombie apocalypse, well I’m sure they could, but I can see how they’d fuck it up. Tanks run for hours, not days. An individual soldier carries a few hundred rounds. I certainly can see how confusion, panic and relying on training against humans (double tapping center of mass, use of suppressive fire [zombies don’t duck their heads and dive for cover, so the rounds spent trying to cover advances are wasted, or worse than wasted, they draw more zombies] would damp the military’s effectiveness quickly.
You’re not suggesting that the mission would be to deliver water to the zombies, are you? Delivering water is not remotely the primary mission of the military.
You keep pointing out the range of tanks, but I don’t see the relevance. The military wouldn’t abandon their bases, turning into scavenging marauders. What would the limitations of a tank’s range mean?
Most bases are not in heavily populated areas to begin with, so they’d be like the farm in walking dead, but with superior perimeter defenses. They would fairly easily be able to maintain security on their supplies, and would be able to clean things up in any direction they’d need to go with little fuss or muss.
You’re not suggesting that the mission would be to deliver water to the zombies, are you? Delivering water is not remotely the primary mission of the military.
You keep pointing out the range of tanks, but I don’t see the relevance. The military wouldn’t abandon their bases, turning into scavenging marauders. What would the limitations of a tank’s range mean?
Most bases are not in heavily populated areas to begin with, so they’d be like the farm in walking dead, but with superior perimeter defenses. They would fairly easily be able to maintain security on their supplies, and would be able to clean things up in any direction they’d need to go with little fuss or muss.
So you’ve never read about people cleaning up explosive casualties with a mop and putting what’s left of them in a bucket or a plastic trash bag? You can also find pictures of human jello, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
I do agree it’d be easy enough for the zombies to take over. The military option won’t be exercised soon enough, then it will take them awhile to form a plan and assemble all the units and put them into position. They won’t be firebombing cities until things get way out of hand. Setting up defensive encampments in the middle of a changing battlefield will be problematic. I’m just saying whenever the military and the zombies meet the zeds are going to get blown away. But just like a counter-insurgency it wouldn’t matter if the kill counts are 10:1, eventually the military will grind down – if for no other reason they’ll run out of gas and ammo because everyone responsible for making and transporting said supplies are now zombies.
Except that the military’s expected response to a zombie apocalypse wouldn’t be to retreat to their bases. They would be expected to get out and engage the threat/protect the citizenry.
The first orders that come down aren’t going to be “Retreat to Fort Benning!”
Agreed, but neither would it be "Hey, go out in disconnected units wherever you like such that opponents who move at no greater speed than a jog, and which move with no coordination or strategy can get close enough to bite you.
Who said anything about retreating to Ft. Benning? There are troops already at Ft. Benning. It is described as a “power projection platform” capable of deploying combat ready forces by air, rail, and highway.
I’m reasonably confident that they’ve given thought to just how they would go about doing that. No, it isn’t the dmz, but neither is it a tea party amongst a couple of mess hall staff who are going to cut and run when something untoward happens.
Setting aside the inarguable evidence in World War Z, we have the real world history of military endeavors. The military typically is ready to fight the previous war more efficiently and more effectively, but then they can be challenged when the next war is different. (“Next time, we’ll really kick ass in an Asian jungle war! Oh, wait, we’re going to the desert this time? Shit…”) They can adjust and overcome, of course, but it’s not always easy or without setbacks.
Zombies would really throw them for a loop, especially since in most zombie scenarios the people exist in a world without George Romero movies or any other previous exposure to the zombie concept. It’s a complete surprise and they don’t even really grasp the situation – what’s happening, the mechanics of how to avoid, kill, or prevent zombies - until the infection is widespread and much of the typical defenses are compromised already. Then the military and everyone else is at a disadvantage when they really start getting serious about fighting back.
Now if we’re talking about now, today, real life, where the concept of a zombie is well known, our military might not lose so much time rejiggering its operations for full zombie containment. (People like us would be brought on as expert advisers. 
)But there still would be a delay while society realizes what’s really going on, and that delay would be one of the key problems.
Hentor’s scenario presupposes a military that responds quickly, efficiently, and in the smartest way possible to a zombie outbreak, and as much as I admire our folks in the military, I wouldn’t count on that. Too much bureaucracy and plain old human nature to get in the way.
Clearly this military vs. zombies question needs to be answered by … a computer simulation!
Ooh, I also just thought of the question: do you have to be infected with a bite to become a zombie? Or does anyone who dies by any means become a zombie. I know what that rule is in the graphic novel, but don’t know if it’s the same in the TV show.
In WWZ I don’t remember what the rules were there, but that’s another problem. People die in the military in vehicle crashes, from wounds sustained in/out of battle, and are then on site inside the military base.
That brings us back to my previous point again - since we don’t know how the vast majority of the population got zombified, we have no basis for assuming soldiers were exempt from becoming zombies.
In WWZ it was a virus (Solanum). I am almost sure there were regular, uninfected dead.
As for whether this sort of collapse is realistic:
First, the issue is not whether the military could respond effectively. It’s whether the military might not respond effectively. A military capable of responding effectively still might not. These stories are simply premised on such a failure. Much like how stories about rich guys, who go to good schools, marry well, and have nice, ordinary lives make boring movies, so do stories about quick zombie takedowns—there are some quick-zombie-takedown stories out there, by the way.
Second, you really can’t overstate the possibility of a collapse from within the military before there is a real understanding of how the zombie state spreads. If a bitten soldier is taken back to a base, the soldiers transporting him, the medics treating him, and pretty much anyone at the hospital who passes within arm’s length of him are all going to be exposed. It’s hard to imagine these scenarios in a world where people don’t already know about zombies. Once you do account for their ignorance though, it is pretty obvious that our instinctive and trained response to dealing with the injured (including not shooting them in the head) would be our undoing.
Third, it’s possible with a massive infection in just one metro area of, say, 10 million, to put the situation well outside any wartime precedent in terms of kill numbers.
Fourth, there will be a reluctance to flatten American civilian areas until it’s too late.
Yeah, in WWZ the virus is spread mostly by bites. It can also be spread through organ transplants and/or blood transfusions and people infected that way seem to have a longer incubation period than bite victims for some reason. It’s also assumed to be transmissible through sexual contact, but they never try to confirm this (since anybody deranged enough to try fucking a zombie probally wouldn’t heed any warnings about STDs). Presumably Solanum can also be spread with a living, but infected person. Maybe even via their salivia (ie kissing).
The TV producers are intentionally being vauge on whether this is an everyone-who-dies-reanimates scenrio (like Romero’s films) or a bite-victims’-only scenario like WWZ. They might not have even made up their minds yet. I think the characters believe you need to be bitten to come back. The speed at which society collapses suggests otherwise though. The comic does eventualy answer this.
Comic spoilerEverybody is infected, the virus just lies dormant until you die, then you reanimate if your brain is still intacted. Bites are still fatal, but they’re not the direct cause of reanimation.
The military bases in the US aren’t built for defense. Most are large tracts of land surrounded by little more than a chain link fence and a checkpoint at the entrances. Assuming there are enough people to defend the entire fenceline and zombies don’t just overrun the fence, they will soon have thousands of refugees showing up demanding to be let in. If you let them in, some will be infected and eat you from the inside. Try to keep them out and they will try to force their way in when the zombies show up. Either way, you end up with a mix of civilians and zombies and lots of blood and death and panic and everyone will probably end up dead. It just depends if you want to have that fight at the wire or behind it.
There’s also no reason to think they’d be immune to infection. They don’t stay on base all day every day. Go have lunch near a military base and the restaurant will be filled with camo. Many troops don’t even live on base, and the ones that do are likely to live in barracks that resemble college dorms. Get a couple infected in there and it’ll spread quick.
In the US, the active duty military doesn’t take to the streets, only the national guard does. And what they usually do is go to an area where needed and secure street corners and medical stations. They will be dispersed trying to keep order and dealing with the public at close range, not locked and loaded and lined up to take the zombies on toe to toe. In other words, they’re doomed. By the time the politicians realize the full power of the active military is needed, it could be too late.
Pretty much anywhere the military does go, they will become an island in a sea of zombies and refugees. They can’t circle an infected city and point their guns inward or else the zombies from the burbs will bite them in the ass. They have to defend outward. But when they do that, you get the same scenario as the base defense from above.
What they need to do is position themselves in a line with a large secure geographical area to their back. They can let survivors through to be dealt with by other units and hold the line against the zombies. In order to survive, they’ll need to pick a chokepoint to defend, not respond to where it’s needed, and it’s almost certain that they will be tasked with responding to where it’s needed.
All of this is why my zombie survival plan includes looting guns, ammo and MREs from all the dead military scattered around the area.
If you’re going to talk about WWZ so much, please do it in a WWZ topic.
Nobody has talked extensively about WWZ.
What about prisons? They’re designed to keep people away from society-at-large, are fairly well-fortified, and should have plenty of food and ammo stored away. I could see a group of people systematically sweeping different quadrants, killing zombies as they go along.
Yeah, there’s the convict/zombie problem, but you’d figure that a vast number of them would be still behind bars.
I think that the contrast between WWZ and TWD is entirely relevant.
And…pure speculation but spoilered as it is pertinent to the comic
[spoiler]Could the virus have two stages (or maybe there are two viruses) so that everyone is infected with the Reanimation virus, but that when a person dies, the virus reacts to the changes of the host body and causes a total system failure - rampant fever and organ shutdown. Thus when someone is bitten, they get the second stage virus which kills them. Activates the dormant reanimation virus, which then reaches maturity and becomes the bite virus. That might explain why people who died in the cars did not come back as zombies. The bite virus (or stage) did not occur and let the reanimation virus come back to life.
Additionally, are there any no pathogens that are transmitted solely through saliva?That might explain why blood exposure would not transmit the second stage of the virus.[/spoiler]