Jim Hague said:
I disagree, honestly. As noted earlier, one of the central tropes of the genre is the breakdown of civilized authority and the revelation of what lies beneath the thin, everyday veneer. You may have small (but effective) unites of military personnel, but if you're going to keep verisimilitude...
Verisimilitude is not the quality of resembling artifice or fictional tropes. It is the quality of resembling truth. Out in the real world the civilized authority isn't perfect, but IMO it also doesn't generally conform to the central tropes of anti-authoritarian satire. I simply don't accept that 'Dawn of the Dead' is a accurate judge of peoples behavior.
I'd also note, for those who keep pooh-poohing WWZ's take on the military response - the military does, eventually, get its act together and strike back...but only after large portions of the world have been lost.
Once again, it occurs like this because it is a convention of the story. The zombies push humanity into small pockets of survivors (against all odds IMO) with the power of plot, and then again with the power of plot and against all odds the beleagured survivors take back thier world. It happens like that because that is how stories work. It's the freakin' plot of Star Wars. It's the classic epic narrative. It may make a good story, but that's it.
Modern tactics are brought to bear initially, but considering those tactics are all designed around fighting a human enemy, they prove woefully ineffective in most cases.
A 155mm shell dropping on an enemy position is not going to be woefully ineffective even if that enemy is mass of zombies. The typical 'shambler' zombie is of no real threat to a modern military unit, which is mechanized, armored, and specifically trained to deal both with 'human wave' attacks. While some things that they are used to using won't work that well (claymores, frag grenades) because they typically rely on soft tissue damage, the modern military is trained to deal with an enemy that is presenting small targets by taking cover and possibly wearing armor while that enemy is shooting back. Personally, I'd rather face the shambling zombie horde than a equal number of enemies with grenades and assault rifles.
To take the world back, the militaries that survived the Zombie War had to adopt new tactics entirely.
About the only thing that I think the modern military would be poorly equipped to handle is melee combat. Current tactics are so effective against human wave attacks that melee combat is virtually obselete in modern warfare. So no one carries serious melee weapons anymore. With some of the more effective defences against a human wave attack being less effective, and shoot and scoot not always being an option (though its alot easier than if you are being shot at), you could initially have problems with overruns. But that is pretty easily dealt with compared to fighting clever humans with rifles, RPGs, machine guns, etc. and devising tactics for that.
If we want to talk about real versimilitude, lets talk about the fact that everyone 'knows' how to kill a zombie, not to get bit, etc. even though no one has any real experience with actual zombies. Our metagaming might get us in trouble for a while, but people learn fast.
