Of all the military reforms Russia underwent as an empire, a Soviet Union and then a federation, none were as revolutionary as those of the late 2000s, when Anatoly Serdyukov ushered the armed forces out of the 20th century and into the era of modern warfare.
The scale of the changes is undeniable. The Russian military currently boasts some 800,000 personnel. In 1985, that number was about 5.3 million. It fell to between 3 million and 4 million in various stages of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which retained just over half of its available equipment. The reduction owed not just to reduced state finances but to the urgent need to modernize and enhance combat readiness in the face of new threats to its new border – as well as to the fact that the population of the country had been more or less halved.
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