Economics of the Egyptian Military

Compared to similar protests for democracy like Tiananmen Square in China twenty years ago, the Egyptian military has been surprisingly supportive of the people. There are several reasons for this, but the most interesting is the fact that the military actual run many of the Egyptian industries and has a vested interest in economic stability:

...car assembly, we're talking of clothing, we're talking of construction of roads, highways, bridges. We're talking of pots and pans, we're talking of kitchen appliances. You know, if you buy an appliance there's a good chance that it's manufactured by the military. If you ... don't have natural gas piped into your house and you have to have a gas bottle, the gas bottle will have been manufactured by the military. Some of the foodstuffs that you will be eating will have been grown and/or processed by the military.

Or to put it another way:

These billions would be threatened if the protests devolved into full-on civil conflict. People in the middle of violent political chaos don't buy dishwashers.

They run somewhere between five to forty percent of the Egypt's several hundred billion dollar economy. How do we know all of this? One of the good things to come from WikiLeaks.