Since 2008, Russia's conventional Armed Forces have been subject to a controversial reform and modernization process designed to move these structures beyond the Soviet-legacy forces towards a modernized military. While this defence transformation received full political support from the country's leadership, the reform itself became hostage to a serial experiment as military leaders grappled with its implications. In general terms the overall reform aspiration to develop better-trained and better-equipped smaller and more mobile forces to meet the potential threats likely to face the Russian Federation in the future demanded an equally far-reaching reform of the combat service support system. The following report examines these changes, focusing on Russia's militarystrategic mobility and assessing how far progress has been made toward genuinely enhancing the speed with which military units can be deployed in a theatre of operations and the capability to sustain them. In turn this necessitates examination of Russia's threat environment, the preliminary outcome of the early reform efforts, and consideration of why the Russian political-military leadership is attaching importance to the issue of strategic mobility. Among the key findings is that the newly created combat units in Russia's conventional Armed Forces supported by a reformed material-technical service offer very limited deployment capabilities. Although the combat service support system has been streamlined and reformed, the new system will take time to settle down and to work out how best to cooperate with combat units to facilitate improved strategic mobility. Enhanced strategic mobility is unlikely to emerge in Russia's Armed Forces before 2020. Among the combined-arms brigades the organic structure is still being recalibrated, with an anticipated basic approach by 2015 to include 'light', medium/multirole' and 'heavy' brigades, while their re-equipping will continue to 2020. Russia's military will remain heavily reliant upon supporting combat operations through ground lines of communication (GLOCs). Movement of the brigades with organic heavy equipment is likely to slow deployment, while numerous problems will need to be solved in order to sustain more than a small deployment for a short time. Russia possesses only very limited 'power projection' capabilities. However, this report argues that strategic mobility in current Russian military thinking also relates to the capability of the Armed Forces to deploy rapidly and to be sustained in far-flung theatres of operations within the Russian Federation itself. Moreover, an important conclusion of this report, consistent with ongoing challenges and limitations to strategic mobility, is that in an escalating security crisis Moscow's political-military leadership will continue to be reliant upon tactical early first use of nuclear weapons to 'de-escalate' conflict. Finally, developing the combat structures, equipping them with modern weapons and equipment and integrating these units within a suitably workable combat support system, like the transformation of Russia's conventional forces, remains a long-term work in progress. The final format for these structures, as well as for recruitment and training programmes for military personnel, is unlikely to emerge before 2020.