The military’s abandonment of Mubarak’s regime provided an opportunity for the January 25 Revolt to unseat the ruling elite. The position of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) was welcomed at first, but the frustrations associated with the transitional period invited comparisons with the July 1952 coup. Once again, a vibrant opposition was reduced to making demands and waiting for a council of officers to respond; once again the country was ruled via military communiqués. Are we back to square one, some justly wonder? Will this popular revolt end with officers back on the political saddle? I contest this claim through a historical institutional analysis of the changes that had occurred within the military itself between 1952 and 2011. It is true that in both instances officers held enough professional grievances against the regime to contribute willfully to its overthrow. Yet a crucial difference between the two ‘revolutions’ is that in 1952 a secret society of politicized officers (the Free Officers) rode the crest of military support to consolidate its power, and succeeded in doing so by immediately installing its trusted lieutenants in the security apparatus. In 2011, by contrast, this same security apparatus had effectively sealed the army from politics, and had become too entrenched for seizure from above. Soldiers had no recourse to an in-house political movement with the ambition and organization of the Free Officers, nor could they rein in Egypt’s unruly security agencies and turn them to their purposes. So while the January uprising presented a golden opportunity to dismantle the regime, no political group within the corps had the agility to see it through. Instead, the military behaved as a self-centered institution narrowly concerned with its corporate interests, which had been undermined by the political and security components of Mubarak’s regime. Thus, while the military might certainly enhance its leverage in future Egyptian politics, it simply has neither the vision nor the tools to restructure the established order. The evidence so far, based on a careful analysis of primary sources and historical accounts, points to the fact that the revolt is being thwarted to reproduce the same type of police state that had governed Egypt during the last few decades – another sad reminder of the difficulty of instituting radical change in the absence of a concrete revolutionary organization.