Ships have been over-staffed for generations. When the Skunk Works decided to build a ship (for reasons more having to do with Ben Rich's fixation on stealth than Lockheed's interest in expanding into other industries) they gave it a crew of four, despite having the same armament and mission as a Ticonderoga-class missile cruiser (compliment ~400). All that "swabbing of decks" has less to do with how quickly ships get dirty and more to do with how fucking little there is to do at sea. Ever noticed carefully-coiled and meticulously-tied ropes on a sloop? Yeah, boredom. Of course, backintheday you needed all hands to fight a naval battle. a 3" gun took a crew of a half-dozen people to operate. Each 3-gun 18-inch turret on an Iowa-class battleship took a crew of 94 men. So what do they do when they're not shelling Lebanon?

Cruise missiles are another matter.

The article isn't wholly accurate, though. I'm not sure where I read it, but every F-16 in the air takes a staff of 200 people to put it there. A Reaper UAV, on the other hand, takes a staff of 250. Additionally, the Reaper is a vastly less effective fighting platform; we use them because we can lose them without caring overmuch. And now we're talking about automating the gear-schleppers?

Any fuckwit can fix a Humvee. They're GM 6.2L diesels running 24V on semi-conventional truck parts. Anything Boston Dynamics? Takes a couple cores of GHz processing just to get them upright.

Now watch the sleight of hand

…but those aren't going to be troops. Those are going to be contractors. They're not going to be doing their jobs according to official military paygrade, they'll be doing it on a cost-plus contract. When they show up in Somalia or Bosnia or Ossetia or Kiev, they aren't "troops." They're "citizens."

The CIA has an air force 1/3rd the size of the Air Force. Those are all "civilians."

Not troops at all.