JuanP wrote:"Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak"
“Every battle is won before it’s ever fought.”
Sun Tzu
The first line is excellent advise as it can prevent a stronger opponent from attacking you out of fear of the reprisals. This has kept for example the UK and India relatively immune to attack through the threat of their nuclear strike back capacity.
The second line however implies predestination and I just can't swallow it. For example the US vs Japan battle of Midway in June 1942 is coming up on its 80th anniversary and it was the beginning of the end of the Japanese navy purely by luck. The American attack on the Japanese carrier division took multiple uncoordinated waves of attackers many of whom were shot down without a single bomb or torpedo success hitting any Japanese ship. Then at the crucial moment as the Japanese had just finished devastating the fifth attacking squadron two high level attack squadrons happened to arrive while all the Japanese attention was focused on the torpedo attack. They split up to attack three of the four aircraft carriers and by the time they were spotted they were already in position to commence dive bombing. Also by pure luck the Japanese had a full strike force positioned on deck loaded down with bombs and torpedoes and fully fueled to strike back as soon as they were done dodging the torpedo squadrons. As a result the two squadrons got between three and five bomb hits on the three targeted carriers which all three burned out of control from secondary explosions of the gasoline filled aircraft on the flight deck. If those dive bombers had arrived any other time by as little as 15 minutes before or after the fifth attack the Japanese high level defensive fighters would have spotted the dive bombers well before they were in position and significantly reduced their chances of success. It was pure luck or God's blessing or random chance depending on your viewpoint. On paper the coloration of forces with four Japanese aircraft carriers with highly trained crews vs 2.5 American carriers the 0.5 being the Yorktown which was damaged at the battle of the Coral Sea in May and barely patched together with an under strength air wing at Midway. It should have been a walk over for the Japanese and they did manage to severely damage the already damaged Yorktown enough that it sank under tow back to Pearl Harbor for repairs.
So while appearing weak to draw in an enemy like the USSR did at Kursk or strong like India's 1972 nuclear arsenal deterring the Chinese attacks through Nepal it a fully valid strategic option, luck or random chance or God still plays a huge role in how any battle actually turns out once the fight is ongoing. My dad was a Navy landing craft pilot. In his training in summer 1945 they flat out told his class that of his entire training division they were projecting 90% casualties in the November 1, 1945 invasion of Kyushu, Japan. They told the trainees to make their peace with the fact that nine out of ten of them would be dead before the end of 1945 so they could set aside the fear of death and still perform their necessary duty of driving landing craft from the invasion fleet to the beach as many times as possible before they were killed or badly enough wounded that they were put out of action. Needless to say the Japanese surrender was a great relief to me father and his classmates almost all of whom survived the war and their two years service.
