The Russian Armed Forces implemented many reforms after the 2008 Georgian War, consolidating military districts, streamlining command-and-control structure, and switching from a division- to a brigade-centric order of battle. Overall, these reforms acknowledged the futility of retaining a theoretically mass mobilization-capable force in a time when the political conditions for using it are almost impossible to fathom. Instead, the reforms aimed for a military capable of rapidly generating force of flexible size in any of the multitudinous peripheries of the Russian sphere of influence.
