Superman is an alien and an American.
I can’t imagine how the US Army could have difficulty with zombies-- Mobility alone would be enough of an advantage to guarantee that the army couldn’t lose. Even if the zombies are able to move as quickly as living human athletes, they can’t drive vehicles, which means that if you find your tactics (whatever they are) aren’t working, you just pile into your Humvees and fall back. Or more likely, you never left the Humvees in the first place.
I also question the utility of a pack to horde of zombies vs a machine that has at least 3 machine guns, a 120mm cannon, thermal sights, over a foot of armor, and 65-70 tons of squish powered by 1500 horsepower.
So, funny story:
When I was in tech school, one of the squadrons I was assigned to employed airmen who were not currently in class (either awaiting the start of their class, recently graduated, or out of class due to academic, medical, or whatever reasons) to run various things around the squadron, including the Charge of Quarters (a cross between a security/orderly room and a hotel’s front desk).
Anyhow, as you might expect, these guys get bored from time to time, and proactively decide to dedicate their efforts to the improvements of the squadron and the Air Force as a whole. Some of these guys put their heads together and came up with a “Squadron Zombie Outbreak Contingency Plan” which more or less consisted of “Sound the alarm, secure the dorms/squadron area, and contact other military units on the base and local law enforcement to provide mutual security and response until relief arrives”.
Well, an airman showed it to one of the sergeants as a joke, the sergeant took it to one of his supervisors to share the funny, and long story short, it was signed off by the Squadron Commander and kept in a file cabinet for a time before it was removed in preparation for an inspection from some higher-ups in the Air Education Training Command who might not see the humor in the thing.
So, not the military planning for zombies, per se, but people IN the military planning for it.
Strength in numbers? You’re gonna run out of ammo / fuel sooner or later.
What numbers? This is where traditional zombie stories pretty much always fall on thier face. Even if you have the dead rising from thier graves, there simply aren’t that many non-decomposed dead bodies out there. If they’re the traditional slow moving zombies, they’re not going to be biting very many people at all. That said,
I’m gonna have to disagree with you. Not on any logical or rational basis, but something will simply have to go wrong, it’s the nature of the beast. Setting zombies on fire is** always **a bad idea, that’s just the way these things work. It’d be like the red shirt not dying.
You’d need an infectious disease approach, given the current “infectious fluid undead” in play with the movies. This would be more relevant in terms of biohazard-type planning with units like USAMRIID.
During the Second World War, the Soviets were so hard-pressed by the Germans that they were often forced to face tanks bare-handed. One in three adult Russians were killed by the Germans during the fighting, so there was fanatical hatred by the Soviets. There’s at least one documented case which has a bearing on the zombies VS tanks issue. In this particular battle the Red Army was reduced to rushing the tanks with Molotov cocktails. One of the soldiers had his cocktail shot in his hands while he was holding it, causing him to be instantly engulfed in flames. In his crazed hatred, he rushed the German tank – a human bonfire – and flung his burning body over the air intake, holding on even as he burned, until the inside of the tank ignited and it was destroyed.
I’m sure a large swarm of zombies would have no difficulty plugging up the air intake or even gumming up the treads.
I should note that there is also at least one documented case of an Italian tank being penetrated by a spear in Ethiopia, killing the driver. Zombies may be able to simply peel the armour back with their bare hands.
I hate to hijack, but that was exactly my problem with Brooks and his Zombie books. The fun of the Living Dead films was that conceit, the idea that we might wake up and suddenly find zombies everywhere. We’re never shown and never need to see them taking over the Earth, we just need to know that they do (already have) and take it from there.
There, back to our scheduled programming.
Yes, up to a point, although USAMRIID is all about trying to heal people and avert a broader outbreak, while with zombies all you can do is destroy them.
Not necessarily. Even in “official” zombie canon, you’ve got movies like Shawn of the Dead, Fido, American Zombie, and so on, in which zombies can be domesticated. And we’re talking about the real world here (or at least real enough for the government to spend money planning for it), so any zombie-type attack would have to be based on something currently believed to be real. That limits it to either 28 Days-style infectious agents (for those of us who prefer to live in the real world) or Revelation-style biblical plagues of the undead (for those of us who live in the real world but like to pretend we don’t). For the former there’s the possibility of a medical cure and for the latter the possibility of a religious one.
I think what you are looking for is called the CCMRF Handbook. (pdf)
It’s 204 pages and it deals with all kinds of catastrophes. I guess zombie apocalypse would fall under Biological Threats 
It seems that the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division is training for this kind of stuff (I wonder if they train for zombies?)
That assuming only bite victims reanimate (like in World War Z); in Romero’s films everyone reanimates as long as their brain is still intact. You don’t need to be bitten (all the bite does is kill you).
Yes, but is he a full Citizen, with constitutional and voting rights?
I wanna see the public debate over that one. After all, he’s a friggin’ ALIEN, he’s not HUMAN. And he was NOT born in the USA, so when exactly did he become a citizen?
Careful what you say about comic characters. People always get surprised by what’s happened since they (or non-comic fans in general) last looked. There may well be a story somewhere (cannon or not) which explains things.
…Send more missionaries…
DC did a story a while back where they retconned that he was sent to Earth in a fetal state, and not “born” until he was taken out of his incubation chamber, so he’s a natural-born citizen of Kansas and of the US.
The retcon wasn’t actually necessary, though: A foundling found in the US is considered a natural-born citizen unless that status is challenged before adulthood, and I’ve never heard of Clark Kent’s status having been challenged. Now, of course, it could be, but it’s too late to make any difference for his citizenship.
Link? I would love to see this thread, but there are apparently 750 threads with “godzilla” in it. Help!
Problem is that a modern tank is to a WWII era tank as a WWII era tank was to cavalry. Modern tanks are NBC-capable and pretty much molotov proof. Assuming normal zombies, they wouldn’t be smart enough to go for the air intakes, nor would they be able to get into the tank without tools. It’s physically impossible for any human physiology (barring some sort of supernatural strength) to “peel the armor” off of a tank. Nor would any number of zombies be likely to clog up a tank tread – sand and mud are far more likely to get into machinery than a little bit of meat, and modern armor has no problem with mud and sand in the short-to-medium term.
It’s also going to be hard for a horde of zombies to smother the engine air intake of one tank which will be either firing from a prepared position and ready to retreat if needed, or one that is moving at high speed. Furthermore, tanks in the US are in platoons of 3 or 4, and it would be routine practice for them to “scratch each other’s back” with machine gun fire in the event of infantry (ie zombies) in close proximity to a tank. Any zombie bits that got sucked into the filters would likely get blown back out by the pulsed air system that cleans the filters. Even more troublesome, the air intake is on the top of the hull, behind the turret. It’s in the type of place where people get squished when the turret rotates.
I think people always assume that there would be incalculable hordes of zombies wandering around. But one of the first things any military force would do would be to establish a firebase and keep the perimeter clear. A crew that was alert would never even let zombies get close - thermal sights and accurate coax fire out to a thousand yards means some shambly dead guys means target practice for the gunner. We’re talking 10000 to 1 casualty rates, if that, and there just aren’t that many people + corpses in a small area to give the kind of density it would take to overrun a decent position, even assuming that all these zombies would gather in one place at one time to attack – a level of cooperation that seems beyond non-supernatural zombies.
I just don’t see zombies being much of a threat to a non-Hollywood (read: capable) military force. Look at the battle of Mogadishu. UN forces had an obscene casualty ratio against the Somalis, who were armed and a little bit coordinated, and the UN forces were not even ready to fight that sort of battle.
Zombies aren’t even up to the level of AK toters, and it’s a lot easier to shoot at things that aren’t shooting back.
…they’re yummy.