Saving keystrokes is so Twentieth Century

Rico says that he purloins articles from The New York Times on a daily basis (hey, he gives 'em credit every time...) and has noticed a peculiar behavior: for some unknown reason, they (along with many other on-line publications) truncate military ranks, but usually only the first time it appears in an article.
Thus General becomes Gen., Lieutenant General becomes Lt. Gen., Colonel becomes Col. (and Qaddafi gets that every time), Major becomes Maj., Captain becomes Capt., Lieutenant becomes Lt., Sergeant becomes Sgt., and Private becomes Pvt.
How is not typing 'eneral', 'onel', 'or', or 'ain', or even 'er' and 'ean' saving all that much time, let alone the infinitely small number of bytes necessary to put them up on the Internet?
Rico says he don't get it...