Jordan's new King Abdullah inherits as a pillar of his monarchy one of the best trained armed forces in the region.
The Jordanian military, a legacy of the renowned Arab Legion founded by Glubb Pasha, crushed the Palestinian revolt during the 10-day 1970 civil conflict known as Black September and battled fiercely with Israeli troops during the 1967 war. Jordan lost heavily in that conflict and did not sign a peace treaty with Israel till October 1994.
Supervised largely by Bedouin and Circassian officers, and counting a great number of Palestinian soldiers, the 104,000-strong royal army now is at the service of King Abdullah, who spent his entire career in the military before acceding to the throne. (Out of a population of 4.6 million, more than 40 per cent are of Palestinian origin.)
Despite its reputation as a crack force, however, the Jordanian army is no match for the better-equipped and much larger armies of neighbouring Israel and Syria.
According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the Jordanian army have some 35,000 reservists available for duty.
Its hardware is supplied primarily by Britain, France and the United States, though it also possesses Russian-made anti-aircraft weapons.
It has 90,000 ground troops - two armoured divisions, two mechanised infantry divisions, an independent Royal Guard brigade, one special forces unit and an additional artillery unit.
It possesses 1,141 combat tanks, according to the IISS, as well as some 1,100 armoured vehicles and troop transports.
For artillery it has 115 stationary mortars, 370 truck-mounted mortars, 4,800 rocket-launchers, 360 anti-aircraft mortars, 330 recoilless mortars and nearly 800 surface-to-air missiles.
The IISS estimates the Jordanian navy to number 650 troops, who have the use of three high-speed patrol boats and two others manufactured in the former East Germany. Aqaba, on the Red Sea in the south, is Jordan's only sea port. The 13,400-strong air force has 82 aircraft at its disposal, including 30 Mirage F-1 fighters and 24 combat helicopters.
Jordan also maintains a paramilitary force under the direction of the interior ministry that numbers some 10,000 men. There is also a civil militia comprising roughly 20,000 men and women.