Gen. Robert Cone, the chief of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, said during a recent symposium that he thinks there’s a chance the size of the military’s brigade combats teams will shrink by a quarter in the coming years from 4,000 total troops down to 3,000. Picking up the slack, he said, could be a fleet of robotic killing machines akin to the ground versions of the unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, increasingly used by the world’s armies.

The Military Times’ Paul McLeary was the first to report this week on remarks that Cone, a four-star general, made during the Army Aviation Symposium January 15 in Arilington, Virginia.

“I’ve got clear guidance to think about what if you could robotically perform some of the tasks in terms of maneuverability, in terms of the future of the force,” Cone told his crowd, according to McLeary, adding that he also has “clear guidance to rethink” the size of those infantry squads, which currently are manned by nine troops apiece.

Brigade combat teams are the smallest units of decent size that can be sent into war on their own, Popular Science acknowledged. Even if they are limited to just nine troops apiece, however, trimming their size by a quarter and tacking on still in-the-works robotics could give those brigades unmatched ability on the battlefield.

“If the Army can reduce number of people in squads, it can reduce the total manpower everywhere, and it can acquire vehicles that are both smaller and cheaper,” Kelsey Atherton wrote for PopSci. “In order to reduce manpower without reducing fighting ability, the Army will need to make sure that Brigades have everything they need to be just effective.”

According to Gen. Cone, that could be just a couple of years away and exactly what’s needed.

According to earlier reports, the Pentagon has for years now been tinkering with robotic warriors made to someday replace real life soldiers on the battlefield of the future. Some of those drone troops have already undergone extensive testing, and Cone suggests that they could soon come into good use as the military considers further scale backs amidst sequester-induced spending cuts.

The Military Times reported that the Army is on track to cut its number of soldiers by 60,000 before 2015 is over, and then could trim just as much by 2019 to bring the total number of troops - human troops - to 420,000.

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