Hearing about a drug that hijacks the body's appetite makes me feel like we're in the prologue to a zombie movie.
One problem it highlights is that modern armies and military tactics are incredibly inefficient. The amount of fuel, munitions and calories they use for every kill is staggering. Also much of modern military tactics are based around putting on a massive show of force up front and hoping the enemy surrenders or retreats. That is not a problem if you only have to kill a few thousand people who's spirit to fight can be broken, and you're backed up by a fully functional logistics network. Remove the logistics network and face off against an 'army' of hunderds of thousands of enemies that will never retreat then those tactics will quickly see your fuel and munition stores depleted.
Towards the end of the book the Army has reinvented the infantry square and equipped all their soldiers with bolt action rifles to stop them wasting ammo.
If you want to see how a zombie horde would fare on a battlefield, look at how infantry and cavalary charges did against ww1 machineguns. It would be like that, but 10x worse.
Besides, there is the whole issue of zombies rotting and concervation of energy - after a few months they should turn to rotten goo, or motionless husks.
Oh absolutely and I think the book agrees. I recall them describing battles where the piles of dead zombies where so high the soldiers couldn't see the next wave approaching. The hard part was never killing zombies but making sure you killed all the zombies before you ran out of fuel and bullets.
Machine guns lack the accuracy to stop a zombie completely, and have a limited capacity relative to millions of attackers. Tanks would be able to run over zombies, but eventually would be swamped or simply run out of fuel. All the strategies relied on fighting an enemy with human emotions and a survival instinct, the two things zombies lack.
None of those predicted the hoarding of toilet paper though.