Here's how the military became so powerful:

In 1952, a group of military officers pushed out Egypt's King Farouk and established the Egyptian Republic. The military immediately took charge, and a few years later the revolution's linchpin, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, became president. But even though he came from the army, tensions with the military became "an abiding theme of the entire Nasser period," said Robert Springborg, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "The entire time of his rule was caught up in trying to deal with the military."

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was Nasser's power struggle with Abdel Hakim Amer, the deputy supreme commander, which ended after Nasser arrested Amer following Egypt's defeat during the 1967 war with Israel. Amer either killed himself while under house arrest, or was killed on Nasser's orders.

The military's relationship with the next two leaders wasn't much smoother.

Anwar Sadat, the next president, purged the military of his opponents, and there is a theory that his assassination in 1981 was plotted by the military as revenge.

In the 1980s, U.S. military aid allowed the army to begin modernizing and expanding, but the troops got even richer when Hosni Mubarak, who took power after Sadat, again possibly at the hands of the military, essentially dealt with them "by buying them off," Springborg explained. Mubarak simply gave them total control over their own mini-economy, propped up by low-paid conscripts, while using his own private forces to monitor the troops.

The U.S. and World Bank pushed for the privatization of the massive military enterprises, but Mubarak, to some degree, fended them off, fearing the political consequences of infringing too much on Egyptian Military Inc.

" ... The military views the GOE's [government of Egypt's] privatization efforts as a threat to its [the military's] economic position, and therefore generally opposes economic reforms," a Wikileaks cable from 2008 noted.

By 2011, the army's political and military might was unparalleled. The Times detailed how the army was operating a lavish hospital and a fleet of luxury Gulfstream jets. The interim armed forces government, which governed the nation between Mubarak and Morsi, put foreign NGO employees on trial, leading to the sentencing and expulsion of 43 such workers.

The military absorbs most of the aid the U.S. continues to send to Egypt. It's now the largest army in Africa and one of the largest in the world, and by developing an extensive network of businesses, it has also become a dominant economic force, controlling between 10 and 30 percent of the economy and employing hundreds of thousands of Egyptians.