It's not wise to underplay this. If they're planning a ground invasion, their end goal is causing as much death and destruction as possible to collapse the government.

Agreed. This has been the US playbook for many decades now, and can be traced back to the genocidal tactics used by its first settlers. As Marxists, we know the long term trend is the collapse of western capital. But that doesn't tell us much about the short or even medium term. For that, we can only understand the balance of forces by what's already happened, and project from there.