Chapter 1 starts with a critical juncture that installed a new pattern with the political surge of armies in many Arab states. Newly independent states engaged in the complex task of building their armed forces, also as a symbol of their newly gained sovereignty. During this foundational period, the complex processes of nation- and state-building went hand in hand with the politicization of the officer corps so that the army was propelled as the founder of new, postcolonial political orders and as a specific incubator, in control of real power and endowed with huge power resources. Within this general trend, some militaries were much more submitted to social trends and penetration by societies in the form of ethno-confessional or tribal dimensions, when compared with the relative closure of the Egyptian armed forces to society and its dynamics. Rather than their exhaustion in the framework of national armies, subsequent political developments witnessed their enhancement, as exemplified by Syria and Yemen. And, in this overall picture of heightened militarization in the Arab World, Tunisia appeared as the negative and exceptional case with its armed forces remaining a subservient part of the (civilian) Tunisian state and regime alike.

In this chapter, I explore extensively the history of coup-proofing in Egypt beginning with the Free Officers regime in 1952. King Faruq (1936–1952) was already corrupting his generals prior to the Free Officers’ coup but Gamal ʿAbdul Nasser (1952–1970) surpassed by far whatever the monarchy did in this regard. Nasser also developed multiple security agencies charged with spying on the military, and one another. In Syria, too, corruption and counterbalancing were part of the coup-proofing panoply; and, in addition, identity politics. I show that minority reaction against Sunni hegemony in the military began in the 1960s – two decades after the French left. I trace the beginnings of Alawi ethnic stacking in the Syrian officer corps to the 1963 first Baʿathi coup. I maintain that 1963 proved to be a turning point because the Baʿathification of politics was concomitant with the progressive Alawitization of the officer corps.

Chapter four examines the evolution of the Egyptian military from an organization associated with the implementation of a statist model of development in the immediate post-colonial period, to an emergent fraction of capital in the neoliberal period. Under the tenure of Sadat, leading military figures lost their privileged access to the political sphere. However, this formal depoliticization of the military was compensated with the granting of new forms of economic privileges that enabled the leadership of the military to begin expanding their institutional and personal economic power. In the context of the neoliberal shift in the 1990s and 2000s, the military was able to expand its economic power further, thereby emerging as a fraction of capital in competition with that of the neoliberals associated with the NDP.