This argument is built out of rough numbers that came to hand using quick searches. It's not particularly accurate but gives an idea of the orders of magnitude

This argument is built out of rough numbers that came to hand using quick searches. It's not particularly accurate but gives an idea of the orders of magnitude involved. Google has approximately 100,000 employees. Not nearly all of them are software engineers but, for the sake of this argument and to be generous, let's assume that they are. Let's also be generous in assuming that only people in the US, and nowhere else, use it. That's about 330,000,000 users. OTOH, the US army has approximately 1,300,000 service members and 800,000 reserves as well as approximately 330,000 civilians. So (ignoring physical suitability) the potential labour power of the US army is approximately an order of magnitude greater than Google. Moreover, "labour intensive" usually means "people who go out to do physical things": the work scales with the number of hands you can bring to bear. Combat aside, military forces are often involved in work that requires lots of people to do things in "meatspace": * Rescue operations * Medical assistance in impoverished areas * Food & humanitarian relief * Security at embassies and other locations * Policing in volatile areas * Natural disaster relief * Law enforcement * Piracy and drug interdiction When the software engineers aren't busy thinking about software, they carry cups of tea between the kitchen and their desks (well I suppose they're probably thinking about programming then as well ;-)). Finally, Google currently has a big operation, but like many startups, a pretty big product (the original search engine) was built by ~20 people. With those people they crawled almost every site on the web. If you wanted to go and read every document in every filing cabinet and index that then you'd need a labour intensive force bigger than the US army. Here are the references I used: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-time-google-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces#Personnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces#Per... https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/army-civilian-careers.html https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/army-civilian-career... https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/military-missions-overview.html https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/military-missions...