Gideon Ploy

""When I blow the trumpet, I and all who are with me, then blow the trumpets also on every side of all the camp and shout, 'For the LORD and for Gideon.'""

- Judges 7:18

Strength in numbers can be good. Having a vast force at your disposal can be very intimidating to the opposition. It can make you seem like you have great control over the situation and plenty of backup if things get ugly.

But what do you do when you don't have a whole bunch of mooks on your employee roster? If it's just you and some friends or even a solo act?

Well that is where the Gideon Ploy comes in! Through clever acting, disguises, misdirection, decoys, and other such feats, you make the opposition think you have more in your ranks than you actually do.

Compare To Win Without Fighting.

Literature

 * Silver Shadows (a Forgotten Realms novel by Elaine Cunningham) had a moment when Arilyn used shrieker essence to amplify footfalls of centaurs, so that but a handful running at each flank would sound like a big cavalry charge and demoralize a bunch of mercenaries her side fought and make them waste time, while most attackers advanced from a different direction and on foot.

Live-Action TV

 * The main characters of Burn Notice sometimes employ this tactic, especially when they need to fool someone into thinking that Team Westen is actually a large and far-reaching secret agency.

Mythology and Religion

 * Our Trope Namer, of course comes from the Boom of Judges in The Bible, where Gideon leads an army of only 300 Spartan Israelite warriors against the Midianites, who are described as having wall-to-wall camels. Gideon's night-time ambush and making his army seem far bigger than it was, aided by some holy PSYOP support from God, resulted in the Midianites slaughtering each other.

Real Life

 * The battalions of inflatable decoys in World War II served this purpose.
 * Georgy Zhukov in 1946 was about to be punished for his misdeeds (which included looting by trainloads, as well as aiding and abetting people close to him looting in comparable amounts, and of course this rolled down the ranks), as well as failures. But the other commanders defended him (if chided a little), as a matter of self-preservation: they remembered how The Purges of 1937-39 have started. Agreeing that Zhukov deserved it is one thing, but he won't fall alone, and who can tell how far things will go this time? This gave those not involved an impression that Zhukov had great support in army and allowed him to contend for power against Nikita Khrushchev. For a while.
 * The bluff was called in 1957, and the very same commanders took turns reciting all Zhukov's failures and denouncing him before Central Committee of the party, as an egotistic brute who got too high by being repeatedly Kicked Upstairs, wasted troops for nothing and ordered way too many death sentences. Nobody have defended him. Which, of course, also was self-preservation: it's one thing to make an excessively sadistic commander someone else's problem, and entirely another to let him have more power over oneself. Also, this zigzag of attitudes had a rather ironic epilogue in his near-beatification by propaganda after Khrushchev was overthrown too.