As for the ground combatant, there's been a huge change since
Pickett's charge. You might want to examine the two Iraq wars. Both
demonstrate an ability to apply technology for great effect while
experiencing very limited casualties. No casualty is a good thing, but
if you must fight the war, then the goal is for the absolute minimum
and we've gotten pretty darn good at that.

You might want to look at the story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Echo
Company.
A patrol is still a patrol--you have to get out there to assert control over an
area--and a ambush is still an ambush. All that high tech can't prevent a
modified 1940's panzerfaust/rocket launcher from hitting a truck, or a 1950's
AK-47 from ambushing a patrol, and those are the things filling up the amputee
ward at Walter Reed. The only thing high tech is doing now is keeping people
alive who would have died just a few years ago.
I suppose if they were more competant they'd have found a way to finagle
themselves into a non-combat classification, or not even volunteered. The men
who end up on patrol are ones who win wars; the ones in this war who are
wounded happen to be predominantly the ones who are fighting at rifle range or
closer. They may want to say that they are incompetant, but I think that
judgement belongs to them alone.