History Main / SuspiciouslySmallArmy

* ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' averts this in both dialogue and visuals, with individual battles involving fleets of hundreds of ships. Near the end of the Dominion War, it's also stated that with 1,500 ships, the Klingons alone would be outnumbered 20:1 against the Dominion-Cardassian-Breen alliance, implying the latter had in the range of 30,000 ships (albeit most of them were ~100 meter Jem'Hadar bugs), implying the Federation-Klingon-Romulan had at least close to 10,000 in total, as a few Jem'Hadar bugs are considered a good match for the Federation's stronger vessels. Going by both visuals and dialogue, the sudden jump in fleet sizes from low hundreds to high thousands has two causes. One, increased war production following the crises in ''TNG'' and early ''[=DS9=]'', which was kicked up to ''total'' war production when the Dominion War began proper. Two, the Federation (and implicitly others) were just putting phaser banks and photon torpedo launchers on anything that could fly regardless of how [[BreakOutTheMuseumPiece old]] or [[ImprovisedWeapon unsuited for combat]] they were. Less going from 200 Abrams tanks to 2,000 Abrams tanks in a few years, and more going from 200 Abrams tanks to 600 Abrams tanks supplemented by 1,400 pick-up tricks with machine guns and rocket launchers bolted on them.

** In "Basics," the ship's entire crew is left to wander the surface of a planet. At least one wide shot reveals that there's only about 30 extras playing the crew.

* ''Franchise/StarWars'' often falls victim to this, due to ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale, budget and technical limits, and simple genre conventions that require invividual losses and victories to make a difference in battles. A prime example would be both the Rebel and Imperial fleets in ''Film/ReturnOfTheJedi'' (although hundreds of Imperial ships are shown staying out of the fight in the background). The advent and advancement of realistic CGI in the intervening years mitigated this problem for the Prequel Trilogy, where some planetary battles do appear truly massive, [[FridgeLogic despite it being stated the clone army, meant to fight across a whole galaxy, only numbered in the single-millions.]]

* {{Justified|Trope}} with the Sapri Expedition, an attempt to topple the Kingdom of Two Sicilies during the UsefulNotes/WarsOfItalianIndependence made by an "army" of ''twenty-five'': they weren't trying to conquer the place, just starting an insurrection near the capital of Naples that would then do most of the job. This ended in an EpicFail: seeing the pro-Italian unification patriots coming to try and starting an insurrection, the government warned the people of the coming bandits who had just staged a mass breakout from the jail of Ponza (true: the patriots, aiming to increase their numbers and recover some weapons, attacked Ponza, stole the weapons and tried to free only the political prisoners, but ended up also taking with them the ''many'' common criminals imprisoned there), and sat there watching the AngryMob that ''killed many of the patriots and criminals and captured and delivered the survivors to the police''.
** {{Justified|Trope}} also with the ''next'' attempt, as again the idea was to start an insurrection. This time, however, the patriots were smarter: there were a thousand of them (still not many against the Neapolitan army of '''50,000''', but better), everyone had a gun (though the men were often poorly-equipped adventurers), they stayed clear of jails, they landed in Sicily proper (as opposed to Naples, that, while the capital, was on continental Italy) where the government wasn't popular at the best of times and in a moment in which the population was even more rebellious than usual, and were led by goddamn ''Giuseppe Garibaldi'', the most popular Italian of his time and the one man who could have actually started the insurrection in Naples itself by simply showing up and saying "Let's revolt". Garibaldi's small army quickly swelled up thanks to locals and ''defectors from the Sicilian Army'' joining him, and the attempt succeeded. The Sicilians in fact hardly fought him at all. The Neapolitans ''did'', but their generally poor officers combined with half their kingdom basically joining him off the bat and many of their own peasants refusing to support them quickly led to their collapse.

* ''Series/StarTrekVoyager''. In "Deadlock", Voyager is boarded by over 300 soldiers from a Vidiian warship. We never see more than three at a time, due to the extensive make-up required for the BodyHorror species.

** Oddly inverted with the Unsullied army in full ranks: there are supposed to be 8000 of them but there are least 3 times that in some shots.

* The 4077 in ''Series/{{MASH}}''. A real MASH unit had, on average, around 200 personnel, including at least 10 medical officers (including a dentist and an anesthesiologist), 12 nurses, 89 enlisted soldiers of assorted medical and non-medical specialties, one Medical Service Corps (MSC) officer, one Warrant Officer and other commissioned officers of assorted specialties. The 4077 had, at most, 70 personnel, an administrative staff consisting of just the CO and his clerk (who doubles as a stretcher-bearer and orderly), four doctors including the CO (it was five in season one, but Spearchucker Jones was [[ChuckCunninghamSyndrome written out without explanation]], or a replacement), a dentist (Painless Pole) who was PutOnABus in the season one finale, and an anesthesiologist (Ugly John) who also [[ChuckCunninghamSyndrome disappears without explanation or replacement]]). After Ugly John's disappearance, regular nurses not trained for it administer the anesthetic, something that isn't even done ''today''. [[note]]Anesthesiologists undergo extensive training to administer the correct dosage based on the patient (an incorrect dose could fail to put the patient under, put them out too long, or kill them). It is not something just anybody can do without training.[[/note]]

** ''Film/TheAvengers2012'': No more than a few hundred [[AlienInvasion Chitauri]] are [[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1947pd ever visible on-screen]] in total, even after Loki orders them to "send the rest." Even when we get a look at their home dimension with the rest of the invasion force, we only see eight additional Leviathans, a few dozen space speeders similar in speed and armament to WW-2 prop planes, and a mothership that is [[https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/loki-and-chitauri-vs-steppenwolf-and-parademons.588681/page-4#post-41651091 not particularly huge]] and couldn't possibly hold more than tens of thousands of additional troops at most. This makes their desire to conquer ''an entire planet'' with hundreds of millions of soldiers quite questionable, and calls into question the capabilities of the worlds that they were already stated to have conquered (one is shown in ''Infinity War''). {{Justified}} by the Other and Loki being ill-informed of Earth's capabilities and small armies being the norm in the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's civilizations, such as the aforementioned Asgardians. They still did manage to lay waste to enough of New York City for [[Series/Daredevil2015 Wilson Fisk]] to turn a profit on reconstruction contracts, which is a small victory.

* {{Justified}} in the ''VideoGame/{{Homeworld}}'' series for all the factions, in that they either have a small population or enough committments they can't spare more than two or three dozen ships for any given battle. Plus in the original game the Kushan select a path to Hiigara specifically to ''avoid'' any large concentration of enemy ships, so at any encounter the [[TheEmpire Taiidan Empire]] only has small fleets.

* {{Justified}} with the Sapri Expedition, an attempt to topple the Kingdom of Two Sicilies during the UsefulNotes/WarsOfItalianIndependence made by an "army" of ''twenty-five'': they weren't trying to conquer the place, just starting an insurrection near the capital of Naples that would then do most of the job. This ended in an EpicFail: seeing the pro-Italian unification patriots coming to try and starting an insurrection, the government warned the people of the coming bandits who had just staged a mass breakout from the jail of Ponza (true: the patriots, aiming to increase their numbers and recover some weapons, attacked Ponza, stole the weapons and tried to free only the political prisoners, but ended up also taking with them the ''many'' common criminals imprisoned there), and sat there watching the AngryMob that ''killed many of the patriots and criminals and captured and delivered the survivors to the police''.
** {{Justified}} also with the ''next'' attempt, as again the idea was to start an insurrection. This time, however, the patriots were smarter: there were a thousand of them (still not many against the Neapolitan army of '''50,000''', but better), everyone had a gun (though the men were often poorly-equipped adventurers), they stayed clear of jails, they landed in Sicily proper (as opposed to Naples, that, while the capital, was on continental Italy) where the government wasn't popular at the best of times and in a moment in which the population was even more rebellious than usual, and were led by goddamn ''Giuseppe Garibaldi'', the most popular Italian of his time and the one man who could have actually started the insurrection in Naples itself by simply showing up and saying "Let's revolt". Garibaldi's small army quickly swelled up thanks to locals and ''defectors from the Sicilian Army'' joining him, and the attempt succeeded. The Sicilians in fact hardly fought him at all. The Neapolitans ''did'', but their generally poor officers combined with half their kingdom basically joining him off the bat and many of their own peasants refusing to support them quickly led to their collapse.

* ''Franchise/TolkiensLegendarium'' featured fairly tiny armies all throughout the Third Age. For example, the Battle of the Hornburg/Helm's Deep was only 3,000 Rohirrim (completely mundane early medieval cavalry), with a handful of Ents, vs 10,000 Orcs/Uruk-hai (sub-human infantry). Not only was this an existential battle for the second largest realm of Men, but Christopher Tolkien commented in ''Morgoth's Ring'' that it was probably the largest military deployment in Rohan's history. Most battles in the age were significantly smaller than this; another narratively-relevant example was the Battle of the Five Armies, which had <2,000 Elves, Men, and Dwarves backed up by a single large bear and "hundreds" of eagles (most of which are around the size of large dogs and all of which are vulnerable to shepherds with bows) defeating a not-incomprehensibly-larger number of sub-human goblins bagged up by giant bats and wargs (large semi-sapient wolves) and setting the Northern Orcs/goblins back centuries. Keep in mind both battles decided the fate of significant parts of a ''continent.'' Even the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the largest battle of the age-ending War of the Ring, taking place at the heart of the largest realm of the Free Peoples, so large that just one of the armies involved was supposed to have exceeded anything assembled since the Second Age, had the coalition of Men mustering not much more than 10,000 troops; the forces of Sauron were (vaguely) greater in number, but not enough to instantly win or anything. This would imply a battle on the overall scale of, say, Tours, or Stamford Bridge, or Iconium. Part of this is Tolkien knowingly basing his ConstructedWorld on Europe in the early Middle Ages and [[ShownTheirWork knowing how small armies of that era were]] (see below), but even then, it's a bit extreme. In-universe it's justified as the Third Age being essentially a six-thousand year post-apocalypse compared to earlier ones.