A U.S. Army jumpmaster checks to make sure the parachute rigging for an Egyptian paratroooper is secure / DoD photo
The two men now running Egypt — Hosni Mubarak, 82, and his hand-picked successor, 74-year-old Omar Suleiman — both attended Moscow’s Frunze Military Academy as young officers (Mubarak also trained as a pilot in Moscow). That’s where they learned how to command subordinates — and deal with challenges. Like the rest of the Egyptian military of their generation, they marched in lockstep with the Soviet military’s principles, doctrine and management style.
But ever since the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, promising Egyptian military officers have come to U.S. military schools, including the Army War College in Carlisle, Penn., the Army’s Command General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. Inculcated there with U.S. ideals on lawful civilian control of military, such an education has helped act as a “safety” on the firepower of the Egyptian streets now massing in Cairo and in other cities.
“This new generation of Egyptian officers has been exposed to the American military and has had a very favorable impression of not just the way we fight our wars but also about the relationship between the military and society,” says Robert Scales, a retired Army major general who served as commandant of the Army War College where he launched the international fellows program. “One of the reasons for the army’s reluctance to follow Mubarak’s intent and squeeze the population in Cairo has to do with the Egyptian military’s exposure to the U.S. military.”
A former chief of the U.S. Central Command agrees. “It’s too early to tell, but the payoff could be right now,” says Anthony Zinni, who as a four-star Marine headed Centcom from 1997 to 2000. That command encompasses the so-called “arc of crisis” that runs from Egypt to Pakistan, and includes Afghanistan and Iraq. “The military is beginning to look like it wants to see this transition in an orderly way — it isn’t going in the streets and banging heads,” Zinni says. “So if you look at the investment we’ve made in the military — and I hope it doesn’t change — you can see that it may be paying off.”
Few can be more pleased at the restraint being shown by the Egyptian military as Gawdat Bahgat, an Egyptian-born professor at NDU. “The Egyptian army is not acting like other armies,” Bahgat says. “It did not kill, and is acting in a very professional way, and it’s fair to say the United States should get some credit for this.”
Bahgat says the Egyptian students he has taught need what the U.S. military offers. “They are exposed to American culture and values,” Bahgat says. It changes their outlook. “I don’t want to say they’re brainwashed, but almost all the information and education they receive in Egypt is government-controlled,” says the 1977 poli-sci graduate of Cairo University, who went on to get a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from the American University in Cairo in 1985 (and a Ph.D. in political science from Florida State University in 1991). “I’m always surprised at how strongly they believe that Egypt won the wars with Israel,” he notes. “If you have a high school degree in the U.S., you know that’s not true, but its what they teach them in Egypt.”
NDU students from Egypt and other countries spend up to a year taking classes, and watching Congress in action (or in inaction) and socializing with their U.S. and international colleagues. The students selected for such programs are the country’s top officers, usually with the rank of colonel, fairly high up in the chain of command. Their U.S. experience is highly regarded back home, and can turbo-charge their career track. “Many of them become ambassadors and generals — very important positions,” Bahgat says. “It’s a small percentage, but these are the people who will be making the decisions and have the power.”
Scales estimates such exchange programs send up to 20 foreign officers annually to several U.S. military schools to attend classes with their U.S. counterparts and soak up the cultural norms of the U.S. military. “Over the years it has eroded away the autocratic stranglehold that the Soviets had on Egyptian military,” Scales says. “The long shadow of the international fellows program is being felt in this revolution.”
“Egypt, more so than anyone else in the region, is dependent on U.S. support,” says Stephen Biddle, a military expert with the Council on Foreign Relations. “And one of the things the U.S. insists on when we give that support is that we try to socialize aid-receiving militaries in American style civil-military relations.”
In a U.S. context, that means the military is professional and restrained — and stays out of politics, Biddle says. “They’re in a very ambiguous situation — they haven’t called for Mubarak’s ouster, but they haven’t fired on the protesters,” he says. “The key question is how much has this American socialization taken?”
Daniel Brumberg of the U.S. Institute of Peace says the Egyptian military won’t be able to sit on the sidelines forever. “The Egyptian military may find itself compelled to play an arbitrating role in a new democracy,” he says. “That’s a much more complicated role, and in a sense it has become politicized in a way it wasn’t before — and it’s not going to be able to shirk that off.”
That flips the normal understanding of a military’s proper mission on its head. “We think when transitioning to a democracy that the military is going to be more sidelined, but it could be for the next few months, or even years, that the military will find its role enhanced,” Brumberg says. “They probably didn’t intend for that to happen when they threw their weight behind the protesters, but they’re going to have to live with it.”
Zinni says there are “red lines” the Egyptian army won’t allow to be crossed — if the Muslim Brotherhood or some other element tries to hijack the uprising, for example — the army could find itself in a fight.
The relationship between the U.S. and Egyptian militaries is so close there were some two dozen senior Egyptian military officers at the Pentagon last week on an annual week-long visit as demonstrators took to the streets back home (they cut their stay short). “It would be hard to have ignored the fact that this was going on,” Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said Jan. 28. “We didn’t say anything to them about how they should handle it, and they didn’t tell us how they were going to handle it.”
The Egyptian military’s 468,000 troops makes it the world’s 10th largest and a — perhaps the — key pillar of Egyptian society. There is no need for it to be so big, especially since Egypt signed a peace deal with Israel, its most likely foe. But it is a route into the middle class for many, and often provides lucrative post-military jobs for ex-officers in Egypt’s military-industrial complex or other governmental offices. While its enlisted ranks are filled with conscripts — all able Egyptian males must serve — its officer caste is an elite and powerful force that plays a major role in the nation’s economic and political health. It carried out the 1952 coup that toppled the monarchy, and all four presidents since have come from its ranks. Unlike the police forces, which are reviled by many Egyptians, the army is seen as a stable and professional force.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said Jan. 31 he liked what he saw as he paid close attention to the actions of Cairo’s armed forces. “So far, the Egyptian military have handled themselves exceptionally well,” he said in a Pentagon pod cast. “You can see that just from the pictures that have been displayed, in terms of how they have been accepted by their people.” He added that he expects little to change despite the turmoil. “We’ve had a very strong relationship with the Egyptian military for decades,” he said. “I certainly look to that to continue.”
So far, so good. “If the military were part of the oppression, I would say the policy has failed,” Zinni says. “We missed this boat in Pakistan — [Pervez] Musharraf’s biggest concern when I’d talk to him when he was chief of the military was that we had sanctioned the education of his officers. He said they’d turned internal and didn’t get that broad, secular international education.” If the Egyptian army simply keeps order, that’ll be a big win for the Egyptian masses — and the U.S. military’s train-and-equip efforts.