As nuclear and other arms proliferate, conventional tactics are increasingly useless against each other too. There is no telling how high local warlets could escalate - several billion dead, nuclear winter, the biosphere poisoned for millennia. So military establishments tend to keep each other stalemated in postures of heavily armed non-intervention. Having nothing else to do, their arms tend to turn inwards where they meet with less resistance. Hence the dreary scene of military coups and dictatorships with a 'delicate balance of terror' background.
Conventional tactics are very expensive.
This enormous burden is everywhere crushing the life it is supposed to protect. The dreary scene is also one of enormous protection rackets which appear to justify each other in mutual tacit collusion. But they are, in fact, becoming worse than useless. In the above example it was assumed that covert tactics were used to kill many thousands of people. This was probably unnecessarily harsh.