World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

Our proposal to the White House. We outlined a fully comprehensive program, not only to
eliminate the threat within the United States, but to roll back and contain it throughout the entire
world.
What happened?
The White House loved Phase One. It was cheap, fast, and if executed properly, 100 percent
covert. Phase One involved the insertion of Special Forces units into infested areas. Their orders
were to investigate, isolate, and eliminate.
Eliminate?
With extreme prejudice.
Those were the Alpha teams?
Yes, sir, and they were extremely successful. Even though their battle record is sealed for the next
140 years, I can say that it remains one of the most outstanding moments in the history of
America’s elite warriors.
So what went wrong?
Nothing, with Phase One, but the Alpha teams were only supposed to be a stopgap measure. Their
mission was never to extinguish the threat, only delay it long enough to buy time for Phase Two.
But Phase Two was never completed.
Never even begun, and herein lies the reason why the American military was caught so shamefully
unprepared.
Phase Two required a massive national undertaking, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since
the darkest days of the Second World War. That kind of effort requires Herculean amounts of both
national treasure and national support, both of which, by that point, were nonexistent. The
American people had just been through a very long and bloody conflict. They were tired. They’d
had enough. Like the 1970s, the pendulum was swinging from a militant stance to a very resentful
one.
In totalitarian regimes—communism, fascism, religious fundamentalism—popular support is a
given. You can start wars, you can prolong them, you can put anyone in uniform for any length of
time without ever having to worry about the slightest political backlash. In a democracy, the polar
opposite is true. Public support must be husbanded as a finite national resource. It must be spent
wisely, sparingly, and with the greatest return on your investment. America is especially sensitive
to war weariness, and nothing brings on a backlash like the perception of defeat. I say
“perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society. We like the big win, the touchdown,
the knockout in the first round. We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory
wasn’t only uncontested, it was positively devastating. If not…well…look at where we were before