The Armed Forces of the Republic of Uzbekistan (), is the name of the unified armed forces of Uzbekistan, consisting of the Ground Force and the Air and Air Defence forces under the defence ministry. Paramilitary units include the National Guard, a Frontier Service and a River Force. It is reported to be the largest, and the strongest in Central Asia. 'The country [has] also began professionalizing its military, an effort that has only limited success and erratic government support. But even in Uzbekistan, these changes represent merely a modest beginning and most of the benefits are concentrated in a few elite, higher readiness formations rather than uniformly applied to the entire force. The Uzbek military is woefully inadequate, but it is far superior to its neighbours.' History Pre-history Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, used to be the headquarters of the Soviet Turkestan Military District and on 20 February 1992, the new Ministry of Defence took over the offices which had been formerly occupied by the district headquarters staff. The Uzbek SSR had the strongest Soviet military presence of the other Central Asian Republics, controlling its own and operating its own domestic Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) independent of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union. Establishment of armed forces and military institutions On 2 July 1992 a Presidential Decree established a Ministry of Defence to supersede the Ministry of Defence Affairs. Over the succeeding years, Uzbekistan replaced Russian officers with ethnic Uzbeks and restructured the military to focus on targets like civil unrest, drug trafficking, and Hizb-ut-Tahrir. The three major Soviet military academies, the Tashkent Higher All-Arms Command School, the Chirchiq Higher Tank Command and Engineering School, and the Samarkand Higher Military Automobile Command School, were located in Uzbekistan. This caused the government to not send Uzbek officers to Russia for training. In 1994, they established the joint Armed Forces Academy, to train officers of all branches. Though the Uzbek language was becoming more in use by the army, Russian remained the main language used in training officers, due to the fact that most manuals were in Russian. But today Uzbek language is used in all spheres of defense system as it is an only state language in Uzbekistan Development In October 1993, by the decree, the 2nd Mobile Army Corps was formed on the basis of the 105th Guards Vienna Airborne Division, and the 1st Army