They may frame their potential victims, confusing the international community about which sicle began a given conflict long enough to seize key objectives. They may also make explicit or implicit threats to use weapons of mass destruction should the United States and like-minded countries try to overturn their conquests. They will still have to evict an aggressor from the land it has conquered in wars where U.S. responses are clelayed by political hesitation, geographic distance, or some combination of the two. Such conditions could very easily apply in a place like Iraq or North Korea, where it is cloubtful that the United States would be 2. In such situations, U.S. forces will not have the luxury of attacking an enemy while staying safely out of harm's way.
States is likely to use military force in the future.
Whether conduct- ing peace operations, searching for drugs or nuclear materials, attempting to arrest war criminals, or tracking down terrorists, the U.S. military will need to operate in complex terrain and cope with adversarial forces that may be difficult to identify. That means enemy units will often have the chance to get in the first shot against American troops. New tools and weapons will change many of the tactical specifics of these scenarios, but not their basic nature. But they will depend as much on their basic military skills as on technology and will often not be able to count on detecting and firing at the enemy before coming within range of that adversary's own weapons. Despite these limitations and caveats, not all the news is bad.