An unusual Challenge for unit-builders

[AnchorSteam]

...

As An Addendum: I have a VERY old friend, who attended High School with me, and then
went on to attend West Point. He retired as a Brigadier General, after a long and somewhat
varied career. Nearly two decades ago, when the current Zombie Meme got started, he was
working in the Pentagon, and he contacted me one Saturday morning. After an exchange
of pleasantries, he asked me, " Paul, What do you know about... Zombies....."

So, yes, the United States Army DOES have a Contingency War Plan to deal with a Zombie
Apocalypse......

That is just.... peculiar.
This guy made General, so he's not the sort of oddball that often makes it as far as Lt. Colonel, but it is still hard to know what to make of that.

It makes me wonder if that isn't some kind of code for something else. Mindless hordes of... what? Maybe there is a Bio-weapon being worked on that drives people mad, or just gives them a case of super-Rabies? Such a weapon might seem to be a game-changer in a war with China, but the CCP already spends 2-3 times as much on monitoring and oppressing their own people than they do on the conventional military. If anyone is ready to deal with this kind of event, it's them.

The USA could be the target of such a thing, but the consensus always seems to be that, given how well-armed the population is and how spread-out the population centers are, Americans would be the least vulnerable people in the world to a Z-apocalypse.
Cramped and unarmed populations such as in Europe, Java or India would seem to be the most likely to perish entirely.
Japan is an intereswting case. Highly compressed and unarmed with a tiny military, they would seem exceptionally vulnerable. However, they are meticulously organized and the terrain is amazingly complex. Thousands of strongholds could appear practically overnight. Would the grid last long enough for them to communicate a plan of action to each other?

Funny how this genre can lead to ever-expanding speculation.

[paulrward]

Hello All ;

Mr. AnchorSteam posted :

That is just.... peculiar.........

Funny how this genre can lead to ever-expanding speculation

So I will quell the speculation immediately.

When, in the course of what I thought was a friendly phone call, my friend, who at that
time was a colonel, asked me what I knew about Zombies, I was silent for about ten
seconds.

And then I asked, " Uhhhh - Is there something going on, on the East Coast, that I should
know about ? "

As my friend explained then it to me, a Reporter from CNN. with whom the General, his
boss, was having lunch, asked the General if the U.S. Army had a Contingency Plan for
dealing with a Zombie Apocalypse....

The General replied, " Of Course We Do ! We are the United States Army ! We are ready
to defend the American People from ANY possible threat ! "

When he got back to his office, he summoned his minions, ( Including my friend ) and told
them that they needed to come up with a plan for dealing with Zombies ASAP ! ( After all,
he didn't want to be in the position of having lied to the Media....) This was on a Friday
Afternoon, ( right after lunch ) and his team got going on it !

And I got a phone call from my friend on Saturday Morning. We talked about what causes
Zombie-itis, the difference between fast and slow Zombies, the need for using Head-Shots,
and how you should NEVER use Napalm ! ( Imagine an army of burning Zombies shambling
aimlessly into buildings..... )

I referred him to Max Brooks' book The Zombie Survival Guide, as well as suggesting
that he and his fellow officers review the film, " NIght of the Living Dead". And by this
time we were both laughing uncontrollably.....

But apparently they got busy and came up with an outline for a War Plan by Monday,
and the General was more than happy with it. Any my friend eventually got his one
star before he retired. He is living in Florida, but is well armed and prepared, and he
is ready to move to a defensible location at a moment's notice......

Respectfully ;

Paul R. Ward

[T. A. Gardner]

Yeah, that's a Company/Battalion alright!
And Engineer unit, in fact. Nicely thought-out and it does appear to work, but....
I just don't know if I can judge something like that. What I do see is an efficent unit, but also an inflexible one. The "runners" and "Ninja" types could play havoc with a group like that. IMHO, you could use some back-up

It has several huge advantages over a unit relying on ammunition. The Zombies would be numerous, presumably in the thousands, and in urban areas in the tens of thousands. My unit requires nothing more than diesel fuel and the machinery kept in running condition with a daily hosing off of the zombie bits that get on them.
It can destroy zombies by the hundred without firing a shot, then pile them up, and someone dousing the pile with gasoline and tossing on a match to ensure they don't somehow recover. The human operators need never touch a zombie or even get close to one. If you need barriers and want to erect them quickly find a trailer like this one and get a spool of wire rope. That could be strung between two buildings, on posts etc., to form a heavy duty fence quickly that would stop most or all of the zombies.

Here is what got me started with this;

My own platoon is a RANDOM collection that I will try to justify here.
It may sound silly, but staring at a little shelf full of models is how I came up with this idea in the first place. I got back into modeling a decade ago, for a little while, and about half of these were gifts. I am too old to do any more now with my eyes and my hands the way they are, but anyway…. I think I have accidentally accumulated a really good anti-Zombie platoon here...

...The Tiger and the infantry will have to be seen as optional add-ons, the Tiger because of what it can do to bridges and the Infantry because they are so vulnerable.


Keeping in mind that this is a radon unit, not one set up with the Z’s in mind, how would you rate this Platoon?

The problem with this is that each vehicle is specialized for one task rather than doing many. Worse, the vehicles are all antiques and not only unreliable, but impossible to source parts for. The Wirbelwind for example carries enough 20mm ammunition for just 13 minutes of fire when you break it down. The machinegun has 2 minutes of ammunition at most.

The infantry would be limited to about 100 to 200 rounds per man based on weight and volume.

The difference would be my version could run into several thousand zombies and turn them into so much mulch. Your version would likely run out of ammunition before they got them all leaving you unit in a serious dilemma. It's not like the zombies are acting on intellect and reason, so this isn't really warfare. It's a production problem. How do you eliminate the zombies using the least expensive, most productive means of laying waste to them?

[AnchorSteam]

As my friend explained then it to me, a Reporter from CNN. with whom the General, his
boss, was having lunch, asked the General if the U.S. Army had a Contingency Plan for
dealing with a Zombie Apocalypse....

The General replied, " Of Course We Do ! We are the United States Army ! We are ready
to defend the American People from ANY possible threat ! "

When he got back to his office, he summoned his minions, ( Including my friend ) and told
them that they needed to come up with a plan for dealing with Zombies ASAP ! ( After all,
he didn't want to be in the position of having lied to the Media....) This was on a Friday
Afternoon, ( right after lunch ) and his team got going on it !

Leave it to CNN.

The corrosive effect of the media is undeniable, but it makes me wonder just how far gone they are now. I can't even imagine what sort of "Social experiments" they have been inflicted on the captive subjects that are the enlisted ranks.

[AnchorSteam]

The problem with this is that each vehicle is specialized for one task rather than doing many. Worse, the vehicles are all antiques and not only unreliable, but impossible to source parts for. The Wirbelwind for example carries enough 20mm ammunition for just 13 minutes of fire when you break it down. The machinegun has 2 minutes of ammunition at most.

The infantry would be limited to about 100 to 200 rounds per man based on weight and volume.

The difference would be my version could run into several thousand zombies and turn them into so much mulch. Your version would likely run out of ammunition before they got them all leaving you unit in a serious dilemma. It's not like the zombies are acting on intellect and reason, so this isn't really warfare. It's a production problem. How do you eliminate the zombies using the least expensive, most productive means of laying waste to them?

Yes to all of that, and my platoon of museum-pieces does have a limited shelf-life thanks to the lack of spares and a steady supply of the right ammo.
However, that's just 28 men that can take out about 15,000 Zombine in a matter of hours, on a BAD day.

Also, what you have is a slow horde going to war with a somewhat slower and much larger horde. Can they dash out to save a group of human 30 miles behind Z lines if hours count?
I would propose that our two units be combined and the guns & armor platoon be held for a special occasion.
Alternatively, the Platoon could be a LMOE gang of hold-outs (the most believeable scenario for a collection like that) which has no interest in being "liberated" by you and your engineers. What then?

[Stoat Coat]

Yep, the what if section finally jumped the shark.

The idea of ‘zombies’ is far more real than you might realize.

Ever heard of Cordyceps? They basically operate like the monster from John Carpenters “the Thing”.

They are fungi that infest arachnids and insects with their spores, then basically mind control them to spread the spores and infest further before eating all the internal bug/spider flesh and ‘fruiting’ our of their exoskeletons, finally consuming the host entirely sans the shell. This isn’t just a case of something unknowingly spreading a disease as it goes about its usual activities, the fungus causes its host to do very specific actions.

I remember when the popular video game “The Last of Us” came out people were horrified about the possibility since it was based on this concept—fungal zombies— and now the recent buzz around the HBO series adoption has reminded people again. I’ve played/watched neither of those but went on a morbid research bend because of the buzz.

In the strictest classic sense of a re-animated dead body, are these bugs “zombies”? No. Does it affect humans yet? No, humans even eat them for medicinal purposes at the moment. But then again a lot of diseases didn’t before mutating, perhaps fungus can do the same. The reality is that the arthopod realm has been dealing with a zombie apocalypse courtesy of the fungal realm for thousands of years in the rainforests of Asia.

Reality is often stranger than fiction.