First off, 45 man-hours of maintenance per hour of flight time is pretty good. F-18's require 18-20 man-hours, and they're not useful for getting into heavily-defended airspace. Second, a fleet of 158 aircraft is definitely going to require thousands of maintenance people. This paper is definitely fishwrap at best.
It is a little left-leaning alright, but in this instance, the story originated at the Los Angeles Times (according to the byline at the source.
I was thinking the 3,000-man maintainence group referred to the number of personel required at a Raptor base regardless of the number of assigned a/c.
Also, while looking for more info, I came across this:
Are those in fact HUGE ten bladed ceiling fans in the overhead?
I don’t know about current man-hour rates, perhaps a little perspective is in order. In a former life I flew SH-2F’s, we had older H-2’s, in fact one had a BUNO beginning in 139. Our average was in the 40-50 man hour range, they were old and tired and required significant maintenance. H-53’s during that time had similar numbers even though they were considerably bigger. As an aside, there was a saying in Marine H-46 squadrons that when you add 4 H-53’s for a cruise you double your maintenance. The idea with new aircraft is to get lower cost of ownership with a lower man hour rate. If this is true of the F-22, that is not good.