The Egyptian military has supported the Mubarak regime for 30 years. The key question now is how will it use its power in light of Mubarak 's decision not to resign.
One option is for it to seek to continue to support the regime, even as it promised today that the protesters' demands will be met. In this case it would stand behind a “transition” and would retain intact and under its control the security and intelligence forces nominally situated in the Ministry of Interior.
Another option and more or less the opposite is for the military to serve as the midwife of political reform. In this case it would indicate its support for the opposition’s demands and thereby undermine Mubarak's and Vice President Omar Suleiman’s power to manage the transition from the top, and would begin the purge of the security/intelligence forces that has to occur if any effective civilian political order is to be established. Between these diametrically opposed scenarios are various other, less dramatic ones.
What will decide which scenario occurs? One factor is the military’s cohesion. It has been shaken by Mubarak’s, Suleiman’s and Interior Minister Hussein Tantawi’s mishandling of events and need for its forces to be used to backstop the repression of security/intelligence services.
If the protest movement rejects an engineered transition and the military has to be used directly to bully it and impose order, then officers in combat units may well decide the corrupt Ministry of Defense figures have to go and that the military should stand behind a fundamental change of the political order. A second factor is the U.S. position. If we seek to reinforce a top-down modification of the existing order rather than a bottom-up reform, then we could discourage moves against the Mubarak established order within the military.
The situation in Egypt is extraordinarily fluid and the lack of clarity of U.S. objectives and means so profound that predicting the future role of the military at this stage is quite impossible.
