While numerous scholars have focused on how political leaders in the Middle East have discouraged the military from intervening in politics, often called coup-proofing, there is far less scholarship on what happens within militaries themselves following a coup. Regardless of their outcome, coups unsettle the military by either politicizing the ranks or prompting removals and even trials of military personnel. They upend the military hierarchy, undermine the chain of command, and damage unit cohesion. How, then, do military elites attempt to reestablish internal order? To answer this question, this paper analyzes and compares the cases of Egypt and Syria. Egypt witnessed a coup attempt in 1967, led by Field Marshal ʿAbd al-Hakim ʿAmir, the former commander in chief of the military. After suppressing the coup attempt, President Gamal Abdel Nasser purged, reorganized, and professionalized the military, ushering in a period of unprecedented presidential control over the armed forces. A few years later, in 1970, Defense Minister Hafiz al-Asad led a successful coup in Syria. In order to entrench himself afterwards, Asad enacted many of the same policies toward the military as Nasser, but he also stacked it with his coreligionists. Asad subsequently ruled Syria with the support of the military until his death in 2000. As events, both coups brought about the consolidation of authoritarian political power in relation to the military. Yet there is little to no analysis of what transpired in the Egyptian and Syrian militaries at these critical junctures. Up until now, scholars have been hampered by a lack of data, relying mostly on memoirs of former state officials. But these memoirs, while crucial, are necessarily limited as they were published decades after the events of interest. For this paper, I tap into a new set of Arabic-language sources and leverage innovative methods — both computational and comparative-historical — to highlight the patterning of contemporaneous perspectives of military elites after coups in Egypt and Syria.