Operation 1027 has resumed in northern Myanmar, eight months after the rebel offensive dealt a surprise hammer blow to the coup-installed State Administration Council (SAC) military regime.
On October 27, 2023, multiple targets in Shan state were hit hard by the Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BA), a rebel coalition comprised of the ethnic Kokang Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), the Arakan Army (AA) and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA).
They were joined by insurgent allies from the Mandalay People’s Defense Force (PDF), the Bama People’s Liberation Army (BPLA) and factions of the communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
In over four months of intense fighting, the 3BA captured 18 towns and 36 military bases, including battalion-sized bases and Military Operations Command 16. The rebel operation killed several hundred Myanmar Army soldiers and compelled over 4,000 troops, including several brigadier generals, to surrender.
Key Shan state border towns were also captured, as well as most of the territory north of the city of Lashio to the Chinese border. Most dramatically, the MNDAA recaptured Laukkai city on the China border, which the insurgents had lost to the Myanmar Army in 2009.
By all accounts, Operation 1027 has reinvigorated and emboldened the anti-SAC resistance. In the weeks after the surprise offensive, similar escalations were mounted across the country.
Those were most prominently seen in Operation 1111 in Kayah state by combined Karenni and anti-coup PDF forces. Later in November, the AA announced that 1027 was being extended to Rakhine State. AA’s subsequent military gains in Rakhine have been equal, if not more dramatic, than the initial phase of the operation in the north.
Much of Rakhine state and Paletwa Township in neighboring Chin state has since been captured by the AA, with insurgents overrunning two Military Operations Commands and even capturing the state’s Thandwe airport.
In the north, the insurgent Kachin Independence Army (KIA) launched Operation 0307 in early March and has steadily advanced throughout Kachin and neighboring northern Shan state.
The tempo of fighting in northern Shan state declined after the “Haigeng Agreement” was brokered by China in January. As an ostensible ceasefire, the agreement was mainly ineffectual, with frequent SAC breaches in the form of airstrikes and artillery bombardments. Those violations of the deal spurred the TNLA to resume its flank of Operation 1027 on June 25.
In recent days, the TNLA has seized the town of Naungkhio on the Mandalay-Lashio highway, halfway between the military bastion of Pyin U Lwin and the Goteik Viaduct. There has also been heavy fighting in Kyaukme to the north. Naungkhio’s seizure came in response to a series of drone and airstrikes on TNLA camps in the township.
SAC forces have been unable since October to push reinforcements up the main highway but have successfully moved supplies for several weeks around Lashio, where the military’s Northeastern Command is headquartered, as well as the Shan state town of Hispaw to the west. The military is also reinforcing troops in Mogok and Mong Mit.
On the eight-month anniversary of 1027, it is worth considering eight key lessons: four positive and four cautionary for the anti-SAC resistance. The first is the importance of operational security. The initial success of 1027 owed largely to its thunderclap surprise.
That the offensive itself, plus the movement of troops and materiel over a long period, caught the SAC off-guard illustrates the limitations of its battlefield intelligence, both human and signals. Keeping attack plans restricted to “need to know” inner circles clearly works.
The second concerns planning and logistics. Clearly, the offensive was meticulously organized and phased.
In the best analysis of 1027 so far, produced by the Myanmar Peace Monitor in April, Nyo Twan Awng, the deputy commander of the AA, claimed that the alliance had been “preparing for almost five years to launch this large-scale operation. With the adequate preparations for this operation, we were able to plan it secretly. In Operation 1027, we were able to carry out attacks in a strategic, collective, surprised and synchronized manner.”
There is merit to this: the 3BA staged a “mini-1027” in 2019 in the same area as the current fighting. That the alliance could assemble the correct force structure, arms and ammunition, and conduct tactical training on attacking specific targets, illustrates a level of strategic maturity.
The third lesson underscores the power of effective alliance-building. In just 15 years, the 3BA has grown from the runt of the ethnic armed organization (EAO) litter to the rebellion’s top dog which many PDFs are striving to emulate.
The alliance has worked partly, if not largely, because the three main members are not natural antagonists, with the AA having no real claim to territory in Shan state, and the MNDAA and the TNLA seeking to control contiguous territory (although tensions have surfaced between the two in recent months).
The 3BA was initially slow to support the post-coup resistance but it has obviously benefited from training and arming of the Mandalay PDF and other anti-coup proxies.
The fourth lesson, an intangible element of any war, concerns plain serendipity. As the old saying goes, “luck is where preparation meets opportunity.”
Operation 1027 was launched at a time when China wanted to clear scam centers that had proliferated along its border with Myanmar and evidently provided some measure of support for the 3BA to launch the operation when it did.
That all said, it is equally important for the alliance to learn from mistakes and challenges that pre-existed or have emerged as a result of the 1027. Some of the cautionary lessons from the operation have been suppressed or downplayed – to the alliance’s detriment and future peril.
The first concerns the devastating asymmetry in firepower vis-à-vis the military and its ruthlessness in exploiting the armed advantage, including through its grotesque pummeling of civilian populations.
The SAC has increasingly used airstrikes, heavy artillery, naval bombardment and drone strikes to pummel towns lost to the resistance since 1027. The SAC regime has deployed both “counterforce” and “countervalue” targeting to the extent that the distinction between combatant and civilian has fundamentally broken down.
The second has been the utter failure of the National Unity Government (NUG) to take a more prominent leadership role in the anti-SAC war of national liberation. A Shan intellectual quipped soon after 1027 “you know the NUG was not involved for two reasons: one, it was a surprise and two, it was a success.”
Claiming an unwarranted leadership role in 1027 further dented the exiled government’s credibility. The hapless NUG really only had the occupation of the Sagaing town of Kawlin to show for its limited role in 1027.
Yet the town was recaptured several weeks later by SAC forces and largely destroyed. Nor have the gains of 1027 been matched by progress in the crucial Anya theater in the country’s central region, which is still chaotic, competitive and increasingly out of the NUG’s influence.
The third has been seen in the immense challenge of administration after achieving military victory. EAOs with a long history of “governing” populations and territory, with established and capable “civilian” departments and usually robust civil society networks, are fully cognizant of the challenges of keeping towns functioning after seizure.
But for a group like the 3BA’s TNLA, the fast and major expansion of the territory it now operationally controls since 1027 has come with grave responsibilities of how to administer towns with little experience and limited resources for water, electricity, livelihoods, law and order, transport, education and health.
While parts of Karen and Kachin states are accustomed to insurgent-led administration, even these experienced groups are facing the demands of urgent humanitarian needs as the territory under their occupation expands. By some estimates, Myanmar now has as many as three million displaced civilians.
The Karenni Interim Executive Council (KIEC) is expanding its administration with a legal system but it has the benefit of a comparatively small territory. The dynamics of northern Shan state are much more daunting.
Lastly, 1027 has revealed inter-group tensions between EAOs in northern Shan state, especially between the Kachin and Ta’ang, long-standing competition for control of territory and issues related to how local populations are treated by each armed group, including over the vexed issue of forced recruitment.
Unresolved tensions among armed Shan groups and with 3BA members could divert attention and resources from sustained fighting against the SAC.
There are added tensions with the perceived expansionism of the United Wa State Army (UWSA), which hosts many 3BA leaders as well as EAO and NUG leaders. The notion that 1027 demonstrated unprecedented “unity” needs to be tempered by a more acute understanding of underlying internecine tensions.
The folly of prediction is another overarching lesson of 1027. Almost all commentators were too hasty to pronounce the imminent demise of the SAC and a nationwide military collapse.
Some now discredited outfits were irresponsibly rash to predict collapse in “three to six months”, that large-scale, coordinated urban attacks on SAC positions were imminent and that various “tipping points” toward regime collapse had already been reached.
Careful and honest analysis over jingoistic triumphalism will lead to longer forecasts of conflict and thus more accurately portray the multiple challenges that will follow any insurgent military victory.
As Operation 1027 enters its next phase, its leaders and strategists will need to study and weigh the lessons of October 2023 carefully and adapt their tactics and plans for the most likely still long struggle ahead.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar