A plan Donald Trump requested for the campaign against the Islamic State group is due to the White House by Tuesday and will reportedly be significantly broader in scope than the kinds of war reviews the Obama administration periodically commissioned. America's top military officer believes it will set a new tone for the U.S. government beyond the regions where the U.S. is currently fighting the extremist group.

"This is not about Syria and Iraq," Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday. "This is about a transregional threat."

That threat is not limited to just the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, but includes other terrorist networks like al-Qaida and possibly the Haqqani network, Dunford said, and will require more than simply a military response. Indeed the review, which Trump ordered on Jan. 28 and is led by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, includes input from each of the military services, officials say, from the Departments of State and Treasury, as well as from the intelligence agencies.

Those familiar with the contents of the review and the options Mattis will present to Trump are reluctant to discuss it, and few know precisely what the culminating document will entail. But two things are certain: There are no easy solutions, and Trump will not be presented with any choices that won't have potentially dire consequences.

"The war part is straightforward and easy," says Paul Salem, a vice president at the Middle East Institute. "It's what's left after the war, and what politics is put in place after the kinetic part of the war is over, that will determine the sustainability and outcome of the military actions."

Salem is one of multiple experts who fear that most immediate actions Trump could order in the near future – whether an increase in U.S. forces on the ground, lifting some rules of engagement for attack jets, empowering local fighters or any other options expected to be in the review – are fraught with the potential for causing more dangerous problems in the coming years.

Many factors serve as potential landmines on the path to success. At stake are the lives of millions of people displaced by the conflicts, particularly in Syria, where Trump has previously advocated for the creation of Gulf state-funded safe zones to protect the refugees. Military officials have questioned the value of establishing clearly defined safe zones, which they worry would be difficult to police and would become high profile targets for further extremist attacks.

The Kurdish PYG militia – which has aspirations for independence that must be addressed when the region is stabilized – has served as one of the most effective proxy forces for the U.S. on the ground in Syria. But the Turkish government considers the group to be a terrorist organization and may withhold U.S. access to the ground it has helped clear in northern Syria without assurances the Kurds won't become emboldened in a manner that the government in Ankara considers threatening.

Sunnis in Iraq remain highly skeptical the Shiite-dominated government under Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi will ever be inclusive to them, risking the dissolution of a country the U.S. poured thousand of lives and billions of dollars into preserving. It remains unclear which of the liberating forces will help govern cities like Raqqa and Mosul once they're cleared of extremists.

And Trump has said he would like to work more closely in the fight against terrorism with Russia, which maintains an ongoing military campaign in support of the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad. But the U.S. military is banned by law from cooperating with Moscow.

Speaking at the Brookings Institute on Thursday, Dunford said he expects the review will provide opportunity for the new administration to look at what he called "an enduring challenge," to reflect back on the successes of the campaign since it began in 2014 and to put the problem into a broader context before deciding how to move forward against extremism.

"I view this as an ongoing dialogue," Dunford said. "Solving the problem of ISIS should be an ongoing dialogue."

The general, through Mattis, has served as a key source of information for Trump, who must now, along with a close circle of White House advisers, determine how to fit campaign promises into executable plans. Many world powers are also waiting to see how the president proceeds.

Salem recently returned from a trip to the Middle East to meet with regional leaders and to Berlin, where he met with Russian counterparts who have close ties to the government in Moscow. Most remain confused about the Trump administration's intentions, he said, but optimistic about his stated goal of healing rifts abroad, particularly with Russia, and uniting countries in the Middle East to cooperate more for regional security .

"I think they correctly surmise that this president really wants a decisive defeat of ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa in 2017," Salem says. "This is a big deal for this president and this White House, and that they do want to achieve that at least: victory in those two cities."

Dunford on Thursday echoed concerns about what comes next.

"Anything we do on the ground has to be in the context of political objectives or it's not going to be successful," he said. "We need to think about, how do the facts on the ground address the political process in Geneva?"

The general was referencing ongoing peace talks between elements of the Syrian regime and opposition movements in Syria, made cumbersome by the extent to which both parties have entrenched themselves in the warring state and won't simply dissolve even if one or the other were to declare victory.

The realities of the civil war – born like many others in the Middle East from the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings – complicate any effort to defeat the Islamic State group and prevent any of the other comparably terrible extremist networks from replacing the militant group. These complications also apply to neighboring Iraq, where successive governments have failed at including all major ethnic groups in a ruling hierarchy.

"There's no successor on the horizon that could generate enough voluntary participation from a large enough fraction of society to produce political order, and that's why you have civil warfare going on," says Stephen Biddle, previously a senior adviser to Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal in Iraq, now with the Council on Foreign Relations and professor at The George Washington University.

Civil war will continue until governments in Baghdad and elsewhere can become more stable and more inclusive, he says.

"Between now and then, America's options amount to fiddling around at the margin at a non-trivial cost," Biddle says. "So we could change the rules of engagement, fly more air strikes, and that's not going to end the war. It might or might not speed up the demise of ISIS a bit, but then there will be no successor to the Islamic State that can stabilize the country."