It's the kill chain. The signals and strike complex that hardly even requires any physical footprint to fight the war beyond intel assets which can identify locations and personnel for targeting. Like blitzkrieg before, the target is the communications nodes. Only this time in the hybrid war age the targets are decisionmakers. The head politicians and chiefs of staff to paralyze activity within the targeted countries. We've seen this with Venezuela with the capture of Maduro, and now with Iran and the precision killing of Iranian army officials and now possibly the head of government.
As long as the target is the weaker army, the causalities for these kinds of attacks is essentially cost-less. The only real factor to consider is munitions stocks. Since attacks like this are easily replicable, it may be entirely feasible to bomb a country until it throws the white flag and surrenders altogether. That would be an entirely new paradigm for modern war. One which would require a very limited human footprint for deployment.
Until now, the main counterweight to war has been the political costs of causalities and enforcing a draft. Not needing that begins to lower the political costs as well. Going on a world rampage subjugating weaker countries becomes quite feasible. So long as the goal is not to occupy, but to force them to surrender and negotiate their own interface with the imperial system.
This is also how dissidents and dissent is going to be dealt with in countries worldwide, in a parallel but similar way. You can't form a political organization of any size without the government hitting it with massive spying, infiltration, deflection and subversion operations on key members to disrupt political objections. It's another version of the kill chain.
These certainly are changing times