Timeline for Why can't the military kill the Walking Dead?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
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| Feb 20, 2014 at 19:16 | comment | added | Matt | @JohnO I think you missed my first comment. Or perhaps I didn't describe a "failure drill" very well, because that was my whole argument: they would start making them right away. A "failure drill" is 2 to the body 1 to the head in less than 1 second. So they're already trained to evaluate "1, still coming, 2, still coming, 3, put him down" very very quickly. So they would start making headshots immediately. Consequently, they'd figure out really fast to just skip the first two. As RCB pointed out, though, that still doesn't solve all the other problems. | |
| Feb 20, 2014 at 17:37 | comment | added | John O | @Matt Headshots don't help the military unless they start out making them immediately. By the time they figure out that they need to make headshots, things have gone bad already, and they're reduced to the same survival mode as anyone else. | |
| Feb 20, 2014 at 16:13 | comment | added | Matt | Totally! Especially, because (like was mentioned elsewhere) the military's primary tool is intimidation... which doesn't work on zombies. I also liked your point about there not being many psychopaths in the ranks. Military personnel are going to have a really hard time dealing with the idea of shooting unarmed (lol) civilians. | |
| Feb 20, 2014 at 11:07 | comment | added | Royal Canadian Bandit | @Matt: Fair enough. Regular troops, not used to fighting zombies, may well be capable of head shots. Then we are only left with the problems of numbers, supplies, and morale in the face of walking corpses who are utterly incapable of fear. :-) | |
| Feb 19, 2014 at 16:58 | comment | added | Matt | Lol! Not much, no, but when we (the Marines) did in South/Central America and the Philippines, it proved to be such a big problem, with such an easy solution that it was included in the basic training for every Marine. That happened to also be during the time when the Army and Marine Corps transitioned from the WWII era Colt 1911 .45 to the modern Beretta 9mm. Because Soldiers and Marines were used to having the stopping power of the .45, they were all the more surprised when they put a magazine into someone and he was still coming at them. At least a .45 will knock them over ;-) | |
| Feb 18, 2014 at 9:16 | comment | added | Royal Canadian Bandit | @Matt: Does the US Army spend much time going to war against meth-heads and opium fiends? Pretty much by definition, they don't present much of an organized military threat. :-) | |
| Feb 17, 2014 at 19:29 | comment | added | Matt | One point to note, although military personnel are trained to aim center-of-mass, they (we) are also trained for something called a "failure drill," as in failure to stop. When meth-heads and opium fiends were shown to often ignore body-hits, the military began to train "2 to the body, 1 to the head." All of which is to say that the nature of zombies as ignoring body-shots would barely be a factor. There's already an effective solution which is widely trained, and it's pretty easy to figure out ;-) The other aspects seem reasonably plausible. | |
| Feb 17, 2014 at 12:39 | comment | added | Royal Canadian Bandit | Yes. Also, they would be seriously outnumbered. The USA has 736,000 active-duty Army and Marines and 603,000 reserves (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…). In the best case scenario, with all overseas forces immediately coming home and reserves successfully mobilized, 1.3 million troops are facing as many as 300 million zombies, a ratio of 230 to 1. Furthermore, a modern army has a long logistical "tail", with 7 or 8 support personnel for every front-line fighting soldier. So in fact the ratio is more like 1500 to 1 for sustained operations. | |
| Mar 9, 2013 at 7:46 | comment | added | Beta | The power of the military is also psychological. A handful of armed soldiers on street corners can keep hundreds of civilians in line. An army seizes and holds territory, but is almost never ordered to depopulate it, and the heavy guns and tanks are for fighting other armies. All of this breaks down if the enemy civilian population knows no fear. | |
| Feb 12, 2013 at 9:21 | comment | added | jwenting | or a foreign invasion, which would lift the restrictions automatically for the duration in order to drive back the invader. | |
| Jan 3, 2013 at 18:31 | comment | added | John O | Only acting without authorization from Congress. We can assume that during an Outbreak, restrictions would be lifted, especially since it's more akin to disaster relief than police action. | |
| Jan 3, 2013 at 18:14 | comment | added | Jim Green | The Posse Comitatus Act also prohibits the US Armed Forces from acting within the United States proper. | |
| Dec 13, 2012 at 4:03 | vote | accept | n00b | ||
| Nov 26, 2012 at 16:38 | vote | accept | n00b | ||
| Nov 26, 2012 at 16:38 | |||||
| Nov 26, 2012 at 15:17 | comment | added | NWS | The military also make a lot of noise. Which attracts more zombies. | |
| Nov 25, 2012 at 21:31 | history | answered | John O | CC BY-SA 3.0 |