Where are you standing? And for how long?

CURRENT EVENTS

It seems trivial to quibble over a misplaced comma, yet more than any misspelling, an errant pause can leave one nonplussed, especially when it comes in the story's nutgraf.

These changing expectations have made the soldiers now on the ground a bridge from the older war to a fight that stands to become more invigorated, and hopeful, albeit perhaps more bloody as American units push into longstanding Taliban sanctuaries.

Huh? Maybe it supposed to go like this:

These changing expectations have made the soldiers now on the ground a bridge from the older war to a fight that stands to become more invigorated and hopeful, albeit perhaps more bloody, as American units push into longstanding Taliban sanctuaries.

Even then, what is a 'hopeful fight'? And how does something "become more invigorated"? Or, leaving that aside, isn't an 'invigorated fight' inherently a bloodier one?

Moving to a geographically higher, if lower-valued piece of punctuation, I notice the article goes with "longstanding" (seen above) and "yearlong" two paragraphs further down. Searching nytimes.com, both appear to be the paper's standard style. A search of Google News--my favorite style reference--reveals a number of upstanding papers (Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution AFP) using "long-standing." And my New Webster's Dictionary lists only the hyphenated version, but it is a bit outdated, having been published 20 years ago.