My take on this subject was that the author was noting that it was the foot soldiers that were "fighting and dieing" not necessarily the air force and navy. The grunts are the ones who have to get up close and personal.
I thought that the gist of the article was that we have allowed our force structure to change so that we have less actual ground fighting units than we really need. ie. false savings by cutting ground troops and going for the sexy planes and missiles that aren't really effective given the current combat style. That's not to say that these other weapons aren't nice to have.
I don't see the correlation between "not enough guys" and the fact that the guys on the front line are the ones getting killed. Those are the ones you'd expect to get killed.