Yeah, but they’d be a very expensive way to kill relatively few zombies. And with, say, a high explosive shell, only a direct hit would create zombie hamburger. If you accept that a zombie has to be shot in the head, then it follows that shrapnel won’t be very effective against zombies. And my understanding is that most of the casualties from explosives are from the shrapnel, not the immediate explosion.
I suppose it just depends on how big your zombie outbreak is.
But, back to the OP, I really doubt there’s an actual Pentagon plan for zombies. Why plan against the entirely fictional? Zombies are about as plausible as ghosts, killer tomatoes, or flying monkeys.
As Max Brooks pointed out since zombies don’t feel pain (or have a self-preservation instict) a zombie on fire would keep moving around and spreading the fire until enough damage was done to it that it became imobile.
Well there are those guys who prepare for a zombie apocolypse on the grounds its a good way to prepare for just about anything else. I can’t recall exactly what they call themselves, but they had a wikipedia article which hadn’t been deleted last time I looked (or when I first found it a few months earlier).
To be fair, hamburgers aren’t known for their locamotive skills.
But that’s against soldiers who are dispersed and using cover, not shambling out in the open. And if it takes a lot of shells to kill zombies, that’s what massed artillery, cluster bombs and such are for. And then there’s weapons like .50 caliber machine guns ( which can cut a tree in half much less a zombie ) and belt fed grenade launchers.
It’s not likely to move much if it’s shredded, as pointed out. And most likely, the entire area it’s in is going to be engulfed in fire from the incendiary weapons themselves, anyway.
I saw a documentary on this once. Apparently, the zombies can mesmerize you with their coordinated dance maneuvers. Once you are immobilized in this way, your brain is theirs for the eating.
Some years after the documentary was filmed, however, an unfortunate discovery was made. A person who comes into close contact with the dancing zombies and is actually allowed to live will start to suffer strange and troubling medical conditions that will grow more severe over the next few decades. The chief documentarian fell victim to this syndrome. He has experienced a baffling complex of symptoms, both physical and psychiatric. His skin turned pasty pale. His nose fell off. And by all accounts, he’s gone entirely batshit crazy.
Based on this one man’s singular experience, the Pentagon has indeed come up with a contingency plan to deal with a zombie apocalypse. It’s long, but here’s a summary: “Shoot them in the head before they can start dancing. Shoot Vincent Price too, while you’re at it. Keep anybody who has been exposed to zombies away from pre-teen boys. That is all.”
Ah – but we have discussed Godzilla attacks here in GQ before.
On the main point – the zombie war fiction generally shows the convential military as thoroughly useless. Realistically, as this is GQ, how well would the US military fare against a zombie outbreak? Assume that the National Command Authorities have gone through the necessary stages of disbelief, reconnaissance, staff meetings, news blackouts, and finally public proof, and generally acknowledge that there is a zombie “situation.”
That probably depends on how big the outbreak is. Max Brooks had a medium sized, combined arms unit (a brigade?) wiped out by the entire population of Zombie New York City, and I found that to be pretty plausible. Sure, each high explosive shell could kill tens of zombies, and larger bombs could take out hundreds easily, but when there are millions you run out of ordinance fast. Each air strike or artillery barrage could take out hundreds, but how how long before you run out of all those high explosives? How long before all of the big machine guns are out of ammo?
What kind of zombies are you talking about? I suppose the standard sort in these scenarios will shamble along, eating whatever is within arm’s reach. The only way to kill them for sure is to destroy what’s left of the brain. Inexperienced soldiers would waste a lot of ammo shooting zombies in the torso and only slowing them down a bit. Fast zombies would be a lot harder, obviously, since then you can’t even rely on the “stand your ground, aim for the head, save your ammo” tactic.
How concentrated is the outbreak? If one in ten people are infected, that might be diffuse enough to be handled with martial law, regular patrols, and house-to-house clearing.
If there are full-on zombie hordes, that probably becomes a ratio game. My WAG is that any unit should be able to handle 10:1 odds if they know how to kill zombies, and 100:1 with a lot of support, good tactics, and plenty of ammo.
Those are pretty radical assumptions. First of all, who would really detect a zombie outbreak first? It seems to me that it would be far more in the lane of public health officials, not the military, as science fiction writers and movie producers are quick to assume. Just think about it for a moment: the military doesn’t keep track of American deaths, causes of death, and they certainly wouldn’t be the first to know about reanimations of people in hospitals, morgues, or whatever. Doctors would almost certainly be reporting these strange occurrences to public health offices and the CDC. I think speculation of news blackouts are without merit, as public health officials and the media have been so quick to report on things like the H1N1 virus.
If anything, I would think news of a zombie outbreak would be spread and substantiated far more quickly than the H1N1 story. One can’t really show the swine flu on TV, but pictures of a reanimated corpse would be CNN/Fox News ratings gold.
As far as military planning, although I am not an expert on the matter, I understand that there are various levels of plans. There are strategic and theater plans which lay out very general, top level objectives; there are conceptual plans (CONPLANs) which are a step toward designing strategies to achieve objectives; and there are operational plans (OPLANs) that include very detailed instructions on how personnel are to be mobilized, how logistics are going to work, etc.
The reason why I explain this is that there is virtually no chance of there being an OPLAN for a zombie invasion. However, there may be more conceptual plans for what the military should do if there were to be a general insurrection in the United States. For example, such a plan may lay out which facilities in the US must be protected, but not go into the operational detail of what troops need to protect them and what units those troops will come from. But it would stand to reason that these conceptual plans would be valuable as a framework for informing the early stages of a military response to a zombie insurrection, even though the plan wasn’t designed for that threat specifically.
Also color me skeptical that the issues that most people talk about in hypothesizing how unprepared the military would be, as displayed in World War Z when military units were destroyed by the zombies, would be as big a deal as is made out. Once the strategy to protect critical facilities, secure lines of communication, and conduct reconnaissance is done, telling soldiers to adjust their tactics, techniques and procedures to shoot zombies in the head, not the chest, isn’t something that requires a heck of a lot of bureaucratic churn, in contrast to things like logistics and generating manpower.
ETA: Oh yeah, but I have no idea whether there are more general contingency plans in the military for dealing with something like a mass insurrection in the United States. I would be surprised, however, if there isn’t some kind of very general plan laying out top level objectives for such an event, even though details would not be filled in until the s— hits the fan.
Bit of a hijack, but this is nonsense. The whole reason we have space travel in the first place is because of warfare. Powerful rockets were developed as weapons of war - and so, too, was most of our knowledge of ballistics. (If you want to lob a cannon-ball or artillery shell at the other guy, it helps to know where it will land). The space race was spurred by the cold war, both as a national prestige thing and a deadly serious effort to develop better strategic weapons platforms. For that matter, it’s hard to point to much of our technology at all that hasn’t been given a huge boost by warfare - aviation, computers, etc.
War drives technological innovation. Without it, we probably wouldn’t develop much technology beyond what’s needed to protect us from the elements and keep ourselves fed - and that doesn’t get you to space.
Given that quite a few politicians in the US are fundamentalist christians, and given that Revelation says the dead will walk the Earth after the Rapture, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to suppose the Pentagon has a post-Rapture military strategy paper drawn up. Certainly they must have contingency plans for, say, replacing nuclear missile silo staff who vanish during the Rapture. It’s not beyond the bounds of reason that along with their strategy for dealing with seven-headed blaspheming dragons and locusts with human faces, they’ve got a strategy for dealing with the shambling undead.
The famous “color coded plans” were/are for geopolitical contingencies. They made no specific plans for fighting a particular government (War Plan Red was as applicable to war with a fascist Britain as to a communist or democratic one) or against particular weapon systems or tactical doctrines. Such specifics would be considered operational or tactical concerns, which would be applied to the broader war plan as appropriate.
The usual concept of the zombie apocalypse would probably be addressed by application of a descendant of War Plan White, AKA Operaton Garden Plot – the civil insurrection/revolution contingency. This would be applicable to any enemy popping up within the nation as opposed to invading from elsewhere, as well as to civil disruption caused by natural disasters or the Rapture.
Other factors relevant to a zombie apocalypse would include contagion and the resiliancy/specific vulnerabilities of the foe. These tactical considerations, as referenced above, would be addressed by overlaying specific operational and tactical plans as relevant. Since, as Moltke noted, no plan survives contact with the enemy, an overly detailed battle plan is potentially worse than useless. Better to operate in “Chinese Menu” fashion, and assemble relevant parts into a dynamic whole. That way you’re covered whether the zombies are fast or slow, are killed by headshots or require dismemberment, eat primarily brains or consume everything.
Wait, how could they be aliens and Canadian at the same time? On the understanding that “aliens” in this case specifically means an entity from another planet.