Mazeka
You must be joking
- Location
- United States
OOC: Hesco barriers are made of wire mesh and geotextile fabric liners, not Kevlar. Either Brooks didn't do his research well enough, or Wainio doesn't actually know what Hesco barriers are made of.
Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
- Thread starter veteranMortal
- Start date
It's odd you say this, when also saying that air power/artillery shouldn't be used for this exact purpose.
Moreover, a reinforced square isn't what you want to use in this sort of situation. As mentioned above, a square is designed to protect the formation's flanks. But Zombies aren't fast to naturally get at a units flanks and aren't coordinated enough go make ambushes or otherwise maneuver themselves in that way. The only reason to form a square against zombies when out in the open and on prepared ground is either you pressed too far and have gotten cut off, which would be a stupid move on the officer's part, or if you're dealing with troops that are extremely poorly trained such that you can't rely on them to do normal maneuvers.
Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The A-10 is dogshit, that's why. Drop a dumb bomb on them instead.
neutronium95
Mad Rocketeer
- Location
- The launch pad
Even if you were doing strafing runs, I don't think the A-10's brrt is optimal. 30mm anti tank rounds are crazy overkill. I'd be that a bunch of light machine guns strapped to a Cessna would be about as effective.
GhostStalker
Jeopardy! contestant
- Location
- NYC
I was just thinking about this thread earlier because I was listening to NPR during work this week and there was an interview of Brooks on All Things Considered regarding his latest book just having been released this past Tuesday; the last of a trilogy of kids books set in Minecraft, that apparently has to do with his protagonists dealing with the justifications or inevitability of war and nationhood and community or something to that effect, written just as Ukraine was heating up, and how that could help parents talk to and teach kids about how wars start and the like.
View: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/17/1205702500/author-max-brooks-on-how-the-world-of-minecraft-helps-prepare-kids-for-our-world
There's a transcript of the interview in the article linked above. I was aware Brooks was still writing after this book came out, but I didn't know he's been mainly writing in Minecraft lately. Also apparently that his works have gotten him a lecturing position at West Point, as mentioned in the interview.
And I guess they took for granted that NPR's audience would know Brooks is the son of Max Brooks, since they don't mention his father at all, but stick in a closer about his mom being Anne Bancroft after they mention his dyslexia and how she quit acting to get him through school. If anything, his name and output still get him play in national media like this.
View: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/17/1205702500/author-max-brooks-on-how-the-world-of-minecraft-helps-prepare-kids-for-our-world
There's a transcript of the interview in the article linked above. I was aware Brooks was still writing after this book came out, but I didn't know he's been mainly writing in Minecraft lately. Also apparently that his works have gotten him a lecturing position at West Point, as mentioned in the interview.
And I guess they took for granted that NPR's audience would know Brooks is the son of Max Brooks, since they don't mention his father at all, but stick in a closer about his mom being Anne Bancroft after they mention his dyslexia and how she quit acting to get him through school. If anything, his name and output still get him play in national media like this.
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- Location
- Here & There
Three barrels for a gun.
Why. The fuck did they think zombies are fantasy monsters that need different elements to damage? No one is going to waste time changing barrels on top of whacking ghouls with a trashy shovel.
Why. The fuck did they think zombies are fantasy monsters that need different elements to damage? No one is going to waste time changing barrels on top of whacking ghouls with a trashy shovel.
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Well yes. If the ammunition holds, if the numbers aren't too great, if the line doesn't break.
If not...
You know what's an awful lot more expensive than an artillery barrage?
An infantry regiment.
The weirdest bit was that if the rifle really had a huge kick, you want a sitting position rather than kneeling. Since it allows you to brace the weapon better than kneeling.
And standing position allows you to use your body to absorb the shock better than kneeling too.
Also. Wooden rifles are heavier, so kneeling is also.... Painful. Accuracy will drop rapidly. It's like Brooks hasn't actually fired a rifle in real life before.
The best way is to actually put a couple sandbags down and go prone and sitting. It's ... Just better in every possible way.
Todd elsewhere says the vehicles were their ammo point, carrying their supplies of ammo. And presumably food and water too.
They were marching soldiers absurdly long distances with heavy backpacks, in a country where infrastructure was deceptively intact.
There's a lot of injuries, be it from foot rot, dysentery to being impaled because somebody idea of a zombie trap works on humans too. Add in crush wounds from bridges and buildings collapsing and well .... It ain't pretty.
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Ironically, if you want a "realistic" zombie apocalypse, going full horror fantasy is the way to do it.
Shambling corpses are the first stage. Get enough together, and they turn into a many-limbed horror with, like, psychic powers and shit.
Certainly makes it more plausible for a total societal collapse to occur without gross negligence or incompetence.
Also more fun.
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
The sad thing is that there very much is a version of post-apocalyptic like rugged gunslingers and that whole imagined light infantry ideal that could easily be depicted arising out of the collapse of the complex web of the military-industrial complex and clearing out zombies and like doing some ugly Indian wars and range wars against survivalist nuts and anti-Junta communities and etc... etc...
Its just that looks as much like the Syrian Civil War as it does the Union Army, and in neither case would Billy Yank be purposely trying to make their fail condition be "devoured as they break, unable to retreat". It would just be like, barrel bombing from a turboprop, guys on dirt bikes pulling the horde where they want it to go, technicals acting as the flying artillery rapidly repositioning themselves to cover the normal ground-pounders, and those normal grunts being like, a crude but effective skirmishing line of what are basically militia in random camo jackets and like surplus patrol caps and boonie hats or whatever, firing an eccentric collection of various AR-15/M-16 variants and like garage built copies, stringing out and annihilating the swarms as they pivot and box them into the prepared layers of killing ground.
Its just that looks as much like the Syrian Civil War as it does the Union Army, and in neither case would Billy Yank be purposely trying to make their fail condition be "devoured as they break, unable to retreat". It would just be like, barrel bombing from a turboprop, guys on dirt bikes pulling the horde where they want it to go, technicals acting as the flying artillery rapidly repositioning themselves to cover the normal ground-pounders, and those normal grunts being like, a crude but effective skirmishing line of what are basically militia in random camo jackets and like surplus patrol caps and boonie hats or whatever, firing an eccentric collection of various AR-15/M-16 variants and like garage built copies, stringing out and annihilating the swarms as they pivot and box them into the prepared layers of killing ground.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Also: Tell me that you never actually served in the pre-war American military without telling me you never served. There is no way that if this guy was what he claimed he would not be able to tell what a SIR was based on (the answer is a frankenstein of different mostly semi-autos) just from having cleaned the damn thing.
Like, the guts of a G-36 do not resemble the guts of a AK.
- Location
- Upstate NY, USA
- Pronouns
- Fjf
The Northeast US didn't really get the best variety of SIRs to choose from. By the time they made it our way, any surplus bouncing around was really the worst of the crap.
Much better finding a home armory of some kind with 3 to 10 ARs and lots of ammo.
And in New York / Vermont there were no small number of them once you got into the outer suburbs but before things turned into mostly farms. Most of them had already been looted by people that knew about them, usually killing off the homeowner in the process. Never understood stockpiling that many more weapons than you had people to use them. Are they supposed to fire themselves in a crisis?
My favorite long gun was a .22-250 - accurate, smooth, and perfect for medium range duty. Unfortunately getting ammo for it is difficult now.
Can confirm.
The group of people I ended up with included lots of cops, former National Guard/Air National Guard folks. The A10 pilots that had done tours of duty in Iraq said that being in the air above a chain swarm would've given them an erection that would not have subsided for days.
OOC: VeteranMortal, glad to see you getting back in to the swing of things. Make sure to take care of yourself.
Mazeka
You must be joking
- Location
- United States
What did they end up piloting instead?
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Which is another one of those things that has to have you thinking thoughts like, "This doesn't really seem like something that would have evolved naturally."
Opaline Dreams
Virenina's handler
- Location
- Tei Ura
- Pronouns
- Any
It's not even a thought for me anymore, I straight up don't believe it's natural. My theory (and I know it's crazy, but the world became a crazier place after the Great Panic, so) is that there's some kind of membrane or something between this reality and an alternate one, something happened to rupture it, and now shit from the other side is filtering through into ours. The zombie "virus" is one of them, IMO, and going back to the Fighter Pilot Swamp Trek chapter and the talk about Radio Entities that it spawned, I think the REs are another.
Disclaimer: I don't expect anyone to share this belief, even I'm not sure I believe it half the time. But between ghouls, REs, and the shit I saw at sea (especially at night)...I don't know, I just can't help but feel that our world's become more of a thin place.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
Overkill, and heavy.
An A-10 has sufficient ammunition to fire it's gun for 20 seconds, then it's out. Against a chain swarm, you'd only be able to make a small dent before you'd have to go home for new bullets (and likely, a new barrel as well. They overheat under sustained fire).
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Honestly if you luck into a good source of ARs, or the automatic variants, then they can be a real money maker on the international markets. A lot of units in the middle east still use them because of all the American left overs from the WoT. They're really pretty good guns as well. The continued commitment by the Americans to the SIR, even the factory built variant has made salvaged AR pattern rifles a large profit centre if you're into that stuff.
If it ever becomes safe to do (which probably requires some political changes in Britain at least) I'm going to put together a team and actually investigate all of the ghost stories that came out of the collapse like a heavily armed version of the X-files. Like, we've all heard some shit, and a lot of us have seen some inexplicable shit.
My worry is, given that we see so much commitment to the theory "this must be a natural virus" from Western governments we'll get blindsided by something even worse. I personally think it's more likely alien nanotech than actually supernatural, but whichever way, where there's an actual flat out zombie virus there could be much worse things.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Reactionpost. All OOC, because I don't think I have an IC persona in this thread.
The unfortunate problem is that sometimes you get these otherwise functional individuals who decide that strength should rule and that they exemplify strength... And you get such monsters from a lot of personality types.
In theory you probably could get a reasonably accurate estimate (say, to the nearest few million) if you could figure out the actual scope of the refugee flows. Say, do "before and after" censuses in various areas of Latin America, work out what percentage of the population survived, was zombified locally, or ran for it, do statistical analysis... It could be done.
But it's a lot easier to just pick a number that is large enough that you can say "those dirty foreigners made our zombie-clearance problem meaningfully harder" without being so large as to be totally incredible, and then just assert truth.
And my impression is that this timeline's postwar US government doesn't really have its shit together, or enough of a foundation in scholarship, to do things the hard way.
On the other hand, if you design your tactics around a certain expected casualty exchange ratio, say "that's good enough," and then just do everything that you can do at that ratio or better, you will probably end the war with around about that casualty ratio.
And it's plausible that the junta in this timeline, which was facing an increasingly unruly population that they knew contained factions willing to rebel against their shaky legitimacy, would just say "fuckit" and decide to bleed its population dry, killing off a lot of people of an age to rebel, precisely to avoid such an eventuality, at least until the next generation got old enough to fight for itself.
Fancy complicated systems are bad, simple systems are good, therefore lobotomizing a person and making them clumsier but harder to physically disable makes them a better soldier.
In extreme cases of "reformer" brainworms, you can even see this kind of deeply anti-intellectual attitude simultaneously with praise of "agile" tactics and initiative, but Max Brooks didn't go that far down the rabbit hole because he wasn't quite as bonkers as William Lind.
The modern United States, c. 2023, seems like it can begin to come to terms with the idea "we lost" (outside its fascist movement), but admitting that in a c. 2007 book... Well, Max Brooks had enough brainworms that he was never going to let a 'good' character in his book, one the narrative wants you to accept as being generally correct, insightful, and well-intentioned, acknowledge that.
What would make a lot of sense is highly variable standards of quality, much as you later describe being a problem with the Standard Infantry Rifle. Some clothing was made from the standard fabrics to good standards of stitching in factories that had actual experience making clothes, and would stop zombie bites and keep you warm. Some clothing was made from... well, whatever fabric was available, in sweatshops full of repurposed service workers, but the supervisors were doing their best, and the clothes were, eh, not too bad. Some clothing was made in sweatshops where the supervisors were actively on the take and the whole thing was someone's nepotism project, and the resulting clothes were utter shit.
Nowadays, all the gun nuts love their AR-15s to death, plastic or otherwise, but that's what an extra 15-20 years of historic time buys you: it gets you that much farther out from under the shadow of Vietnam.
Still speaking OOC, I'd be surprised if a nation that can't muster the means to mold plastic (including recycled plastic) can muster the labor to shape that much wood precisely. Plastic isn't that hard to work, and one of the big reasons it outcompeted so many other things is precisely because it is EASY to shape.
Don't have a truck to spare for that shit? Then don't do that stupid shit.
Though it's interesting that this little dig at the 'warrior mentality' is even included, given the overall tone of the book towards "will to fight."
Though if he were recounting everything that happened to everyone in his battalion (a unit small enough that he could reasonably know everyone in it, or nearly so), then it would start to be a little less silly.
So that's not a condemnation.
The one thing I'll say is that static thinking isn't necessarily that bad IF you have trucks on standby to bug out your soldiers with, and aerial reconnaissance. You can see a really big, dangerous zombie swarm coming, you can count bullets. Even given a generally shoestring technical base, nothing too advanced in great quantities... All you really need is some Piper Cub level aircraft capable of circling and keeping an eye out on everything within several kilometers. As long as your logistics aren't fucked and you have the command and control capabilities of a decent 20th century army, you could absolutely set up a static position, blast away, and if you get hit by Too Damn Many, you just bug out under cover of a rear guard fighting from technicals or something the zombies can't keep up with.
It'd work.
So if there were multiple failed "first battles of the 'fightback,' " it's entirely on the junta fucking up desperately due to brainworms.
Infantry cannot defend themselves at Yonkers because they are irresolute soldiers from an irresolute country, who rely on technological gizmos and puny ridiculous FEEBLE WOMANLY ideas like "a bomb the size of a garbage can splattering my enemies into goo."
Infantry can absolutely defend themselves at Hope because they are determined HEROES from a resolute country, who rely on crude MANLY HOOAH EFFECTIVE tools with HOOAH EFFECTIVE MANLY aesthetics, such as spike bayonets.
Well then, I truly regret that you didn't take the opportunity to have the narrator speculate on who told Todd Wainio what that phrase meant, and why they said so at the time.
Any considerations that might cause the whole plan to fall apart because of the enemy not cooperating in the creation of the originally envisioned dream engagement are just... not there. They have no object permanence that would allow them to rudely interrupt the dream engagement. Even if they were mentioned earlier in the same text, they conveniently cease to exist now that they would interfere with The Plan Working.
Still OOC, but...
A military doctrine that works well unless some very specific thing goes wrong, and it has to be that thing in particular, not just any old "not according to plan" moment, is a good plan. It's a good plan for the same reason that a doctrine that works badly unless multiple things outside your control all go right is a bad plan. Because if it works lots and lots and fails in one particular place at one particular time, you probably still win the war.
Theoretically, a doctrine that never fails is better, but the frequency of the failures matters a lot.
By way of analogy, the Germans had a relative handful of superheavy tanks, which rarely got into action in the 1944-45 fighting in Western Europe during World War Two. They had greater numbers of what we might loosely call medium armor (StuGs, Panzer III and IVs, that kind of thing), but still not that many.
The Americans had lots and lots of Shermans, which were in turn a pretty good medium tank, fully competitive with the German medium tanks and outclassed by the heavies in large part because of the weight difference.
The reason the American method worked well here wasn't "because the Americans could dogpile a Tiger tank with 10 Shermans and lose eight of them and still win." It was because 95% or 98% or whatever percent of the time that a fight actually took place, no Tigers were there, and very often, a Sherman was. If your tanks show up most of the time, and the enemy's do not, you win most of your battles. Even if some minority of your battles are a "fair fight" (undesirable) because enemy medium armor is present, and if a tiny minority of them are disastrous blowouts because one of the few enemy heavy armor units actually showed up for a change... you still win everywhere else along the line, and pretty fast, your enemy's heavy armor will be in full retreat because both flanks were turned because the unsupported infantry holding those positions collapsed.
A doctrine that never fails and has an answer for every misfortune is best, but a doctrine that works most of the time and only fails when the enemy specifically conspires to kick you in the gonads in an unusual fashion is... probably not that bad, actually.
Just saying.
A sizeable ridge of zombies, many but not all of which are actually 100% out of action (because physically damaged and flailing zombies are in the pile too) is really shitty footing. And zombies are clumsy. The enemy is shambling over a terrain obstacle, as all the ridge of zombies is still there, just now spread out over the ground a bit more. Zombies are still capable of tripping and falling on their faces.
If the line has dense frontage, they are probably putting enough bullets downrange that there will be a new heap of zombies piling up slightly closer to the riflemen's front line in short order.
What is then problematic is the idea of a large formation like this one (presumably this is a division-sized formation or something) forming a hollow defensive square. That part is trickier, because some of the soldiers actually have rather a long way to walk, and must travel distances comparable to the accurate range of their rifles. Which means they're going to spend a significant time not shooting, which means you have pulled a lot of guns off the front. And a slackening of fire, combined with a rampart collapse, becomes a more plausible way for a formation to be overwhelmed.
My version makes more sense if (like the junta Americans) you don't actually have much in the way of artillery and heavy equipment, only a little, BUT you have a lot of physical space and just retreating to a position twenty miles away faster than the zombies can follow is always feasible. Out on the American Great Plains it absolutely is, but that starts to falter a bit in the denser parts of the continent.
But assuming a remotely reasonable size for the army at Hope, it really does beg a lot of questions how this many zombies were anywhere near the place, if it's in the middle of fucking nowhere.
It is, though in all fairness, it's still true that even coup generals aren't necessarily brash, dimwitted blowhards. Life would be a lot easier if every fascist was dull-witted and aggressive to the point of stupidity.
The unfortunate problem is that sometimes you get these otherwise functional individuals who decide that strength should rule and that they exemplify strength... And you get such monsters from a lot of personality types.
I don't disagree.
In theory you probably could get a reasonably accurate estimate (say, to the nearest few million) if you could figure out the actual scope of the refugee flows. Say, do "before and after" censuses in various areas of Latin America, work out what percentage of the population survived, was zombified locally, or ran for it, do statistical analysis... It could be done.
But it's a lot easier to just pick a number that is large enough that you can say "those dirty foreigners made our zombie-clearance problem meaningfully harder" without being so large as to be totally incredible, and then just assert truth.
And my impression is that this timeline's postwar US government doesn't really have its shit together, or enough of a foundation in scholarship, to do things the hard way.
On the one hand, in all fairness, any nation doing the same thing would have to accept casualties at what is in total a significant rate just to make any headway. Sooner or later, some poor fucker is careless, or unlucky, and gets bit. Or exposed to slow-burn zombie fragments getting into them. Or something.
On the other hand, if you design your tactics around a certain expected casualty exchange ratio, say "that's good enough," and then just do everything that you can do at that ratio or better, you will probably end the war with around about that casualty ratio.
And it's plausible that the junta in this timeline, which was facing an increasingly unruly population that they knew contained factions willing to rebel against their shaky legitimacy, would just say "fuckit" and decide to bleed its population dry, killing off a lot of people of an age to rebel, precisely to avoid such an eventuality, at least until the next generation got old enough to fight for itself.
Speaking a bit more OOC than usual, it's an interesting example of the brainworms you get from the "reformer" military doctrine. Intangible factors mattering more than tangible ones, and simplifying a killing system by "cutting out" elements always makes it better.
Fancy complicated systems are bad, simple systems are good, therefore lobotomizing a person and making them clumsier but harder to physically disable makes them a better soldier.
In extreme cases of "reformer" brainworms, you can even see this kind of deeply anti-intellectual attitude simultaneously with praise of "agile" tactics and initiative, but Max Brooks didn't go that far down the rabbit hole because he wasn't quite as bonkers as William Lind.
Yeah, and this is also a good OOC criticism of the book. It really, really, really leans into the idea that the will to fight matters much more than objective material factors, and it's nearly impossible to spend much time down in that dirt without picking up, again, fascist brainworms.
Yeah.
The modern United States, c. 2023, seems like it can begin to come to terms with the idea "we lost" (outside its fascist movement), but admitting that in a c. 2007 book... Well, Max Brooks had enough brainworms that he was never going to let a 'good' character in his book, one the narrative wants you to accept as being generally correct, insightful, and well-intentioned, acknowledge that.
Now, I do personally feel, OOC, like having the soldiers' clothes be actively shitty and weather-susceptible is pushing it a bit, because these guys didn't actively want their own army to fail.
What would make a lot of sense is highly variable standards of quality, much as you later describe being a problem with the Standard Infantry Rifle. Some clothing was made from the standard fabrics to good standards of stitching in factories that had actual experience making clothes, and would stop zombie bites and keep you warm. Some clothing was made from... well, whatever fabric was available, in sweatshops full of repurposed service workers, but the supervisors were doing their best, and the clothes were, eh, not too bad. Some clothing was made in sweatshops where the supervisors were actively on the take and the whole thing was someone's nepotism project, and the resulting clothes were utter shit.
Speaking OOC, I feel like this whole thing comes from wood furnishing fetishization, mostly based on (here we go again) Vietnam-era denigration of the M-16 rifle, a polymer weapon that replaced wood weapons and had just enough initial teething problems that it got a lifetime reputation as a "Mattel gun."
Nowadays, all the gun nuts love their AR-15s to death, plastic or otherwise, but that's what an extra 15-20 years of historic time buys you: it gets you that much farther out from under the shadow of Vietnam.
Still speaking OOC, I'd be surprised if a nation that can't muster the means to mold plastic (including recycled plastic) can muster the labor to shape that much wood precisely. Plastic isn't that hard to work, and one of the big reasons it outcompeted so many other things is precisely because it is EASY to shape.
Yeah, that's Max Brooks being dumb. Like, seriously, units have armorers for a reason. If you want to carry two spare rifle barrels and some ancillaries for every rifle in your company, that is several hundred pounds of metal. Load that shit in a truck, because there is no fucking way the individual soldiers will want to lug it around on their backs, or realistically need to.
Don't have a truck to spare for that shit? Then don't do that stupid shit.
See, that's another example. In Max Brooks' mental universe, Cool Shit just sort of... exists... and any implications or downsides of it that he didn't think of within five seconds just cease to exist. There's no object permanence. At one time, rifle stocks made of hard plastic are "too hard to manufacture," but at another time, the US rump state can afford to manufacture millions and millions and millions of pyrotechnic rifle bullets and transport them safely without mechanized equipment.
*snrk snrk snrk*
Though it's interesting that this little dig at the 'warrior mentality' is even included, given the overall tone of the book towards "will to fight."
OOC, an interesting way of poking fun at how Max Brooks basically makes Todd Wainio his sole 'vehicle' for portraying the grunt's-eye view of the American campaign, but then wants to fill it with a ton of interesting little anecdotes, to the point where them all happening to the same person strains credulity more than a little.
Though if he were recounting everything that happened to everyone in his battalion (a unit small enough that he could reasonably know everyone in it, or nearly so), then it would start to be a little less silly.
Yeah, because a 52-year-old lady is going to have a lot of trouble keeping up with the pace of a cross-continental military campaign. Especially one that relies heavily on soldiers marching long distances with heavy loads on their backs.
Again OOC to be clear, this is very much something you're creating for this timeline, not a critique of the original, but it's of a piece with the way you've painted the junta, and the way you've painted the junta is itself fairly consistent with what the junta would have to be to do what it did.
So that's not a condemnation.
The one thing I'll say is that static thinking isn't necessarily that bad IF you have trucks on standby to bug out your soldiers with, and aerial reconnaissance. You can see a really big, dangerous zombie swarm coming, you can count bullets. Even given a generally shoestring technical base, nothing too advanced in great quantities... All you really need is some Piper Cub level aircraft capable of circling and keeping an eye out on everything within several kilometers. As long as your logistics aren't fucked and you have the command and control capabilities of a decent 20th century army, you could absolutely set up a static position, blast away, and if you get hit by Too Damn Many, you just bug out under cover of a rear guard fighting from technicals or something the zombies can't keep up with.
It'd work.
So if there were multiple failed "first battles of the 'fightback,' " it's entirely on the junta fucking up desperately due to brainworms.
Again, to be clear, still OOC, yes, and this is Max Brooks' peak brainworm moment.
Infantry cannot defend themselves at Yonkers because they are irresolute soldiers from an irresolute country, who rely on technological gizmos and puny ridiculous FEEBLE WOMANLY ideas like "a bomb the size of a garbage can splattering my enemies into goo."
Infantry can absolutely defend themselves at Hope because they are determined HEROES from a resolute country, who rely on crude MANLY HOOAH EFFECTIVE tools with HOOAH EFFECTIVE MANLY aesthetics, such as spike bayonets.
*snrk*
Well then, I truly regret that you didn't take the opportunity to have the narrator speculate on who told Todd Wainio what that phrase meant, and why they said so at the time.
Does shooting from a kneeling position tend to be a bit more accurate? I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
Yeah, I do think that's a realistic criticism. Again, firmly OOC, Max Brooks' problem is like that of a lot of people who don't learn much about the military before talking and speculating about the military. He imagines a set-piece action of The Plan Working, goes "wouldn't it be cool to watch this plan work," and then constructs a doctrine that is entirely about implementing this plan, on the assumption that it will Just Work.
Any considerations that might cause the whole plan to fall apart because of the enemy not cooperating in the creation of the originally envisioned dream engagement are just... not there. They have no object permanence that would allow them to rudely interrupt the dream engagement. Even if they were mentioned earlier in the same text, they conveniently cease to exist now that they would interfere with The Plan Working.
Being able to see rough patterns of light and darkness might be consistent with scratched-up eyes, but being able to see in detail and at long distances, as humans do, yeah, not so much I'd say.
It'd be pretty rare that this could actually happen.
Still OOC, but...
A military doctrine that works well unless some very specific thing goes wrong, and it has to be that thing in particular, not just any old "not according to plan" moment, is a good plan. It's a good plan for the same reason that a doctrine that works badly unless multiple things outside your control all go right is a bad plan. Because if it works lots and lots and fails in one particular place at one particular time, you probably still win the war.
Theoretically, a doctrine that never fails is better, but the frequency of the failures matters a lot.
By way of analogy, the Germans had a relative handful of superheavy tanks, which rarely got into action in the 1944-45 fighting in Western Europe during World War Two. They had greater numbers of what we might loosely call medium armor (StuGs, Panzer III and IVs, that kind of thing), but still not that many.
The Americans had lots and lots of Shermans, which were in turn a pretty good medium tank, fully competitive with the German medium tanks and outclassed by the heavies in large part because of the weight difference.
The reason the American method worked well here wasn't "because the Americans could dogpile a Tiger tank with 10 Shermans and lose eight of them and still win." It was because 95% or 98% or whatever percent of the time that a fight actually took place, no Tigers were there, and very often, a Sherman was. If your tanks show up most of the time, and the enemy's do not, you win most of your battles. Even if some minority of your battles are a "fair fight" (undesirable) because enemy medium armor is present, and if a tiny minority of them are disastrous blowouts because one of the few enemy heavy armor units actually showed up for a change... you still win everywhere else along the line, and pretty fast, your enemy's heavy armor will be in full retreat because both flanks were turned because the unsupported infantry holding those positions collapsed.
A doctrine that never fails and has an answer for every misfortune is best, but a doctrine that works most of the time and only fails when the enemy specifically conspires to kick you in the gonads in an unusual fashion is... probably not that bad, actually.
Just saying.
Again, OOC, I will observe that in practice, a "rampart collapse" isn't likely to actually overwhelm a battle line of riflemen.
A sizeable ridge of zombies, many but not all of which are actually 100% out of action (because physically damaged and flailing zombies are in the pile too) is really shitty footing. And zombies are clumsy. The enemy is shambling over a terrain obstacle, as all the ridge of zombies is still there, just now spread out over the ground a bit more. Zombies are still capable of tripping and falling on their faces.
If the line has dense frontage, they are probably putting enough bullets downrange that there will be a new heap of zombies piling up slightly closer to the riflemen's front line in short order.
What is then problematic is the idea of a large formation like this one (presumably this is a division-sized formation or something) forming a hollow defensive square. That part is trickier, because some of the soldiers actually have rather a long way to walk, and must travel distances comparable to the accurate range of their rifles. Which means they're going to spend a significant time not shooting, which means you have pulled a lot of guns off the front. And a slackening of fire, combined with a rampart collapse, becomes a more plausible way for a formation to be overwhelmed.
Something like this is a somewhat more elaborate version of what I had in mind. It relies heavily on zombies being stupid, and that's a good thing because that's one of their greatest weaknesses, so not presenting them with a simple situation where "just lurch forwards in a straight line" could plausibly succeed is a good thing.
My version makes more sense if (like the junta Americans) you don't actually have much in the way of artillery and heavy equipment, only a little, BUT you have a lot of physical space and just retreating to a position twenty miles away faster than the zombies can follow is always feasible. Out on the American Great Plains it absolutely is, but that starts to falter a bit in the denser parts of the continent.
A strategy that does indeed rely upon this would indeed have that obvious crippling problem, yes.
But assuming a remotely reasonable size for the army at Hope, it really does beg a lot of questions how this many zombies were anywhere near the place, if it's in the middle of fucking nowhere.
OOC: Given limited plastic-processing capability (see above) no way is that kevlar, yeah. Though it wouldn't be out of line for the book to say "oh yeah, we made our sandbags out of kevlar so they'd be tough" when in reality most of them were just made out of whatever seemed reasonably durable and could be mass-produced or mass-appropriated.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
But why?
So much to unpack here...
- It's entirely possible to make fancy 5.56mm bullets more expensive than a basic 155mm shell.
- It's even easier to make those bullets more expensive when you remember that a six-inch-wide artillery shell is going to re-kill a lot more than one zombie. It doesn't have to compete with a single bullet, it has to compete with one bullet per zombie, plus all the bullets that would have missed while shooting at those zombies. (Artillery doesn't have perfect accuracy, but when you're shooting a horde of zombies, close counts—even more than with horseshoes and hand grenades.)
- Just because the materials existed doesn't mean the lobos were free. A, that's steel that you can't put towards vehicles or bayonets or shovels or whatever. B, making a lobo takes the time and energy of decently skilled workers. C, it's extra weight soldiers need to carry around.
Mounds of soil stop bullets on their own. They don't need kevlar. That's the point of contention—not the use of sandbags, but the use of kevlar sandbags.
Incidentally, the Hesco barriers you cite don't use kevlar either. According to the manufacturer, it's made from zinc-coated steel mesh and "non-woven geo-textile," which Wikipedia informs me is a specialized form of polyester. Not specialized in a "super strong" way, specialized in a "good at filtering or containing certain kinds of soil" way.
That's what we call an "analogy". I was pointing out that your analysis—"A rifle can get the job done, so there's no reason to use anything else"—was a non sequitur. My actual argument in favor of artillery came in the next sentence, which you deleted.
Antitank rounds are good at penetrating armor, but not good at crowd control. It's like spamming call lightning on a bunch of goblins instead of just using a fireball.
The idea is that the Standard Infantry Rifle lets individual infantry deal with any conceivable combat scenario. And to be fair, different barrel lengths would help with that; long barrels are better for sniping, short barrels are a necessity for indoor combat. The problems with this are numerous—no matter how cool RWBY looks, transforming or multi-use weapons are always going to be inferior versions of the weapons they copy—but that doesn't matter.
Max Brooks isn't trying to invent the best weapon for the kind of conflict his army is involved in. He's trying to invent the best weapon for a badass soldier to use, a soldier who can fight in any situation using only whatever's on his person. A slightly more grounded version of B.J. Blazkowicz, basically. Carrying three different barrels for the same rifle is more sensible than carrying three whole rifles...but it's less grounded than giving different soldiers different kinds of rifles.
For some reason, the use of combined-arms tactics seems anathema to Brooks. This is obvious when we look at his complete disregard of artillery, but it shows up in the SIR too. He seems to view armies the way Margaret Thatcher viewed societies—as nothing but a collection of individual soldiers.
It's never too late to invent one! I just stuck a somewhat more competent version of myself into the Midwest vM described.
I don't get the sense that it was intentionally made shitty, just that the junta has poor industrial capacity and wasted too much of it on kevlar. vM doesn't mention it, but like I alluded to in my first post, the only way I can square how much kevlar was wasted on stuff it does nothing for is assuming that some officer was demanding it, regardless of what engineers or whatever said.
Not to be a broken record, but Max Brooks isn't designing an army unit—he's designing a soldier, and since that's the only kind of soldier in the army, he has to be able to do everything. (And also he doesn't realize how quickly the equipment he's assigning soldiers would get too heavy to be practical.) One lone soldier having the tools to maintain and modify his weapon kinda makes sense; one hundred soldiers having one hundred sets of tools is absurd.
I question how static your tactics are if you have trucks that you plan to use for a retreat when the enemy approaches. That doesn't sound like static defense, that sounds like defense in depth. Especially if you don't have any kind of fortifications you're switching between.
(Seriously, why do these soldiers never make any defenses from materials other than undead corpses?)
IC
To give General D'Ambrosia and our interviewer the benefit of the doubt, it sounds like the Standard Infantry Rifle was anything but standard. It's possible that someone could have cleaned one SIR, then later another with different internal components, and been uncertain what to make of the experience.
It's not a likely scenario, but it's possible.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Still OOC:
Though with the junta being so high on their own supply in this timeline, anything's possible.
Also your commentary on the "bred, fed, and led" remark.
Maximizing the rate at which the soldier can fire aimed shots to an acceptable standard of accuracy thus becomes very, very, very, dare I say artificially, important.
I'd amend that to "less people likely to rebel postwar out of disappointment at how the junta is treating them," if only because generally anyone capable of even participating in a military campaign would also be very capable of at least pulling their own weight and generating enough food to feed their own mouth during peacetime.
Though with the junta being so high on their own supply in this timeline, anything's possible.
Oooh, this is a good insightful thingy. Relevant in real life, too.
Also your commentary on the "bred, fed, and led" remark.
The lower rate of fire would absolutely be a problem for the junta's doctrine, though, because by having effectively no support weapons, they sacrifice all ability to even fight large zombie swarms except by putting a lot of bullets downrange Real Fast.
Maximizing the rate at which the soldier can fire aimed shots to an acceptable standard of accuracy thus becomes very, very, very, dare I say artificially, important.
Uh, point of order, just about any military rifle is designed to be able to change out the barrel, because otherwise the whole rifle has to be written off if the barrel is bent, corroded, or otherwise damaged. And that's a bad thing.
Oh hey, that's clever.
Look at browser/flash games. "Tower defense" games, in which all your assets are static and the only goal is to destroy the advancing enemy fast enough that they run out of bodies before you can be overrun, seem to be quite popular. "Elastic defense" games in which you keep retreating and putting up new lines of explicitly temporary defenses, backing up again and again until the enemy collapses in milling confusion and can be picked off at leisure... not so popular.
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- United Kingdom
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- She/Her
I don't think they're deliberately shitty, I just think a kevlar-polymer blend uniform is probably going to be unpleasant to wear.
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- She/Her
One thing to comment on re the SIR is that having a bayonet is not actually something all american assult rifles had pre-zombies. irl the US army has been phasing them out since around the time the book was published.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
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- Present
You don't need helium, hydrogen works just fine. It's not like anyone is using explosive incendiary ammunition this side of the first world war, after all...
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- Upstate NY, USA
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- Fjf
One guy did his tour in the original Gulf War. He was completely out of the service and a high school gym coach when the plague hit. He had a Cessna.
The other guy did his tour in the early 2000s. He was still in the reserves and flew cargo jets for UPS.
And listening to them and their buddies over a few beers, anyone trying to fly after the plague has a "Zack in the landing gear" story.
Scrivener
The Femme In Yellow
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- Don't Leave Me Here You Bastards
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- She/Her/They
Pretty much. It's just extraordinarily hard to accept that the Junta would forgo basic tactics such as "retreating" in favor of line battles, like, these are literal military officers. They should *know* this shit, like what the fuck? Either the Junta was high on copium thanks to Max Brooks's shitty writing or they intentionally decided to accrue the most horrid attrition rates to not have to deal with future rebellions or food insecurity, which I could see happening given the dismal state of the USA in the west.