important, or unimportant?

A number of Egyptians are reporting on Twitter tonight that friends who have already done their military service are being recalled to duty. Some of them find this to be an alarming sign of an impending major operation, while others say it’s longstanding policy.

All I know is this… One of my brothers spent two peacetime years in the U.S. Army, from 1988-1990. In early 1991 (on the eve of what turned out to be the war in Kuwait) he was suddenly reactivated. We thought he was probably just going to replace someone who was being sent from the U.S. to the Persian Gulf, but he ended up being flown to Riyadh himself just as the ground  war started– an unnerving and unexpected event. (Luckily for him, he was in a specialty useless for that particular war: anti-aircraft artillery. Thus he faced no personal danger.)

The point being (and I’m sure this is true for Egypt as well as the U.S.) it is inherently costly to re-activate those whose terms have ended, and it seems unlikely to be done without a good reason. Egypt is absolutely awash in young people, and so (given that they draft young males as they see fit) I can’t imagine that they have a structural /demographic problem of too few bodies to fill uniforms under normal circumstances.