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Watts, Barry D. Long-Range Strike: Imperatives, Urgency, and Options. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, April 2005. [ 3 quotes ]

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U.S. Long-Range Strike Capabilities Impose Significant Costs on Adversaries
 
Third, the US ability to hold targets in the enemy heartland at risk promises to impose costs on any adversary nation whose leaders decide to try to defend their deep targets. During the Cold War, one of the main arguments for going ahead with the B-1 (and, later, the B-2) was to impose the huge costs of maintaining territorial air defenses on the Soviets. The Troops of the National Air Defenses (originally PVO Strany, later Voyska PVO) were established as a separate service in 1948. This service persisted to the Cold War’s end whereas the United States began deemphasizing continental air defenses in the mid-1970s to reduce costs—a decision that certainly made sense given the lack of effective defenses against Soviet ballistic missiles. The point emphasized to senior US defense officials in 1976 was that the B-1, by posing a stressing challenge to the USSR’s air defenses, would maximize US leverage over Soviet military expenditures, channeling them into defense rather than offense, thereby posing the least direct threat to the United States. Thus, whereas the US defense establishment was able to decrease its territorial air defense burden by the early 1980s due to a greater willingness to rely on deterrence, the USSR’s defense establishment chose to continue bearing the full burden of territorial air defenses.
Watts, Barry D. Long-Range Strike: Imperatives, Urgency, and Options. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, April 2005. [ 3 quotes ] [ page 38 ]
Adversaries are Responding to U.S. Conventional Strength by Shifting Towards Mobile or Hardened Targets
 
The broad trend evident in these force developments is that foreign militaries that been paying close attention to evolving US conventional capabilities and are moving toward mobility, periodic relocation, camouflage and concealment, hardening, underground facilities, geographic dispersal, and positioning deep inside defended airspace to improve the survivability of their military systems and facilities. A telling example was the success the Serbs had in 1999 in keeping relocatable elements of their air defense system alive by displacing SAM launchers and radars as little as a few hundreds of yards overnight. These small displacements blurred the precise coordinates of these targets inside the cycle time of the NATO air-tasking-order (ATO) process, which meant that they could survive strikes by systems such as TLAM that targeted coordinates.
Watts, Barry D. Long-Range Strike: Imperatives, Urgency, and Options. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, April 2005. [ 3 quotes ] [ page 55 ]
Adversaries of U.S. will continue to keep targets mobile to thwart U.S. precision guided missiles
 
This situation has far-reaching implications for LRS. Consider targets that are hidden most of the time, only vulnerable to attack during brief intervals when must expose themselves to fire on or otherwise engage US forces. It is possible that such targets will always be located in littoral areas or close enough national borders for their fleeting moments of vulnerability to be observed by standoff surveillance platforms such as the E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS) orbiting outside defended airspace. However, it is difficult to believe that military planners of countries with the geographic depth of China or Russia would fail to grasp the advantages of placing at least some important assets deep inland, well beyond the reach of American standoff surveillance short-range strike systems. Nor, given both demonstrated American proficiency against fixed targets and the difficulties US forces have experienced with more fleeting targets such as Iraq “Scud” launchers in 1991, is it plausible that future adversaries will neglect doing everything possible deny “precision” targeting information to American forces.
Watts, Barry D. Long-Range Strike: Imperatives, Urgency, and Options. Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, April 2005. [ 3 quotes ] [ page 53 ]