North Korea's state media often boasts of successful military and space accomplishments, including the launch of a functional communications satellite, which are not independently verified by outside experts.
Perhaps even more worrying to Mr. Assad, his military has come to rely more heavily on equipment designed for a major battle with a foreign enemy, namely Israel, rather than a protracted civil conflict with his own people.
Close observers of his military say Syria is having trouble keeping its sophisticated and maintenance-intensive weapons functioning.
Relations remain strained, even as Uzbekistan serves as a transit hub for the Afghanistan military withdrawal.
The 10% hurdle, dating from the military-authored constitution of 1980, had been intended in part to diminish Kurdish representation in the parliament.
After 9/11 Uzbekistan became a close strategic partner of the US, providing military facilities and transit routes to support US and Nato operations in Afghanistan.
The material effect of being so isolated is that information is reordered around the reality they can't escape: everybody has to care what the Hamas military guy says; his speech is analysed late into the night by groups huddled over cigarettes.
There is no love lost between the Farc and the US: Washington put the guerrilla group on its list of terrorist organizations in 1997 and poured billions of dollars of military aid into a campaign to defeat them.
A November report by a British thinktank noted a rise in close military encounters between Russia and the west this year, including "violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles, narrowly avoided mid-air collisions, close encounters at sea, simulated attack runs and other dangerous actions happening on a regular basis over a very wide geographical area".
Intent on offering his condolences and meeting Abdullah's successor in person, Obama led an exceptionally high-powered delegation to Riyadh that included former secretaries of state, past presidential candidates and senior military commanders.
He never saw combat and spent most of his military service as a guard in prisoner-of-war camps.
