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RésuméLa Transformation est le nouvel habillage sémantique d’une Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) qui organise depuis quinze ans le débat stratégique américain. Ces concepts renvoient à l’efficacité technique et tactique américaine, mais aussi à certaines ambiguïtés dans les rapports entre succès tactique, succès stratégique, et objectif politique de la guerre. Avant de décalquer les débats américains, les Européens devraient s’aviser de leurs déterminants culturels et de leurs implications politiques.

The Revolution in Military Affairs or RMA renamed Transformation a few years ago and pursued with perseverance in the United States, found in the Iraqi Freedom operation a tremendous demonstration of its technical effectiveness. Progress in the three fields of precision, detection and communication – combined with the faith in superiority supported by control of knowledge – demonstrated the remarkable capacities brought by the new possibilities of precise stand off destruction. However, this formidable tactical and professional victory did not achieve conditions of strategic success ; currently, the political result is nothing like what was envisioned. Close to two years after the official end of the initial campaign, the actual situation in Iraq, shows the ambiguity of Transformation with, at the same time, its remarkable success as an amplifier of tactical effectiveness and, on the opposite, its moderate results – at the very least – at the strategic level. Today, when the Atlantic convergence of the strategic interests and models of use of armed violence is no longer obvious, it is thus useful to question, in Europe, the necessity for adopting a vision of the armed forces deeply marked by a specific American strategic culture.