ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at developments in the US army to transformation, a theme that has been both pervasively interoperable and politically controversial. Transformation is a term that dominated defence reform debates in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is a radical vision of the demands of future warfare and it embodies themes that promise to create a very different kind of US army: smaller, modular, rapidly deployable and highly networked. Transformation has also had a much wider impact, shaping other countries' views on what is an effective modern army. As this chapter shows, despite the prominent role that military transformation has future development of the post-Cold War US paradigm army, it has remained controversial, with many arguing that at best it has been irrelevant and at worst it has actually undermined the army's effectiveness in conflicts such as those in Afghanistan from 2001 and Iraq from 2003.
