In the wake of the fourth anniversary of Myanmar’s military coup, prognostications on the civil war in the year ahead have been notably broader than usual: the State Administration Council (SAC) junta lurches toward inevitable collapse; decisive China intervention rescues the regime and its off-ramp strategy for elections; resistance factions, ethnic and Bamar, sour on each other; and dizzying combinations of all the above.
If then one word encapsulates the war in 2025, it’s “fluidity” – the unpredictability of a precarious balance of mutual weaknesses and antagonisms that offers no room for confident prediction. Save, that is, for the certainty of the country’s accelerating economic decline and humanitarian disaster.
But against this shifting backdrop, two starkly contrasting ground realities stand out. How they interact in the coming months will almost certainly shape the future of the war, potentially decisively and in a manner likely to circumvent Beijing’s efforts to impose a Pax Sinica across Myanmar.
The first and most loudly acclaimed has been the success of ethnic armies – so-called ethnic revolutionary organizations or EROs – in using regular forces and maneuver warfare to largely secure their own homelands.
Since the beginning of “Operation 1027” in late 2023, the Kokang army in northeastern Shan state, its ally and neighbor, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in Kachin state, and, most strikingly, the Arakan Army (AA) in Rakhine have all inflicted crushing defeats on SAC forces to carve out autonomous territories.
The contrasting reality has been the failure of Myanmar’s ethnic Bamar resistance to develop a unified strategy to move a four-year-old guerrilla struggle waged by a plethora of local Peoples Defense Forces (PDFs) to the next level of mobile warfare waged by regular forces that might defeat the national army.
To a large degree, the fault can be laid at the door of the anti-coup National Unity Government’s Ministry of Defense (MoD), a necessarily bureaucratic rather than operational body hobbled by a lack of resources – guns and money – and by the near impossibility of imposing top-down command-and-control on the spontaneous upsurge of popular revolt that characterized the Spring Revolution in 2021.
But at the leadership level, a lack of military experience, strategic vision and personal charisma have also contributed to a ground situation that appears unlikely to change any time soon.
Today’s stasis sees army garrisons with shaky morale but plentiful firepower more or less securely dug into urban centers. In liberated but organizationally fragmented hinterlands, meanwhile, relatively well-armed PDFs are increasingly able to inflict tactical losses on regime forces venturing beyond their urban strongholds but remain critically bereft of any overarching force structure or strategic plan to isolate and defeat them.
If there is a key to unlocking this impasse, it lies clearly in the intermediate zones where liberated ethnic territories around the national periphery meet the plains of the Myanmar heartland. These areas have already emerged as military buffer zones screening ethnic borderlands against a dangerously uncertain future.
A natural extension of the sanctuary and training extended to Bamar youth fleeing SAC violence in 2021, ERO buffer zone policy has involved ethnic forces arming, supplying and directing Bamar PDFs in and beyond their own territories. It has also seen ERO units fighting alongside allied PDFs in Myanmar’s lowlands.
Since 2022, buffer zone operations have been most apparent in northern Sagaing region where the KIA has built up PDFs and participated in the capture of Kawlin and Pinlebu.
At the same time, the TNLA ‘s role in mentoring and supporting the Mandalay PDF and moving with it into northern townships of the Mandalay region has been even more striking in terms of ethnic support for a single, relatively large PDF force operating under ethnic command-and-control.
The Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) has meanwhile built up PDFs beyond Karen state in the Sittaung valley of east Bago, extending operations on both sides of the river northwards towards Toungoo, seat of the military’s Southern Regional Military Command (RMC).
But arguably the most strategically vital buffer zone to emerge has been the most recent, established by the AA, first in the hills of the Arakan Yoma range bordering Magwe and Bago regions with allied Chin PDFs; and then, since January this year, in townships inside the delta region of Ayeyarwady.
The former zone overlooks the Ayeyarwady River valley and Myanmar’s industrial heartland where the military’s Directorate of Defense Industries (better known by its Burmese acronym of Ka Pa Sa) has long run a network of plants whose production of a wide range of munitions ultimately maintains the military in the field.
Abutting Yangon region, the delta zone constitutes the economically crucial rice basket of Myanmar, an ethnically mixed area where Bamar, Karen and Rakhine communities co-exist and where, in the past, the KNLA has had deep roots.
The strategic criticality of both regions has been reflected in the speed with which army command in Naypyidaw has reacted to recent probing attacks by the AA. In mid-January, a large tactical operations group of some 360 troops from the Meiktila-based 99th Light Infantry Division was deployed to stem the AA’s advance across the Arakan Yoma, but by the first week of February, had been decisively defeated after reportedly losing the bulk of its manpower.
In early January, reinforcements including a significant armored contingent from Hmawbi were rushed from the Yangon command to fortify the southwestern RMC at Pathein as it attempted to check AA advances along the Bay of Bengal coast and through the hills toward Thabaung township. Fighting is reportedly ongoing.
At this stage of the war, it seems unlikely that AA has either the interest or capability to attempt storming large population centers in the Bamar heartland such as Pathein in the Delta or Pyay in the Ayeyarwady valley.
Similar constraints also apply to other allied EROs. For instance, the TNLA currently faces heavy Chinese diplomatic pressure to reach a ceasefire with the SAC in the north as part of Beijing’s wider strategy of securing the regime’s survival at least until it can hold the stage-managed elections it has touted since the coup.
But in what might be termed a “buffer zone-plus” strategy, ramped-up AA logistical support for allied PDFs reinforced by the insertion of tactical advisory teams, and possibly even regular units, is likely in the coming weeks to see defensive buffers being extended into zones of offensive guerrilla operations.
Given the strikingly short distances between AA-controlled territory and the strategically and economically crucial Ayeyarwady Valley industrial belt and the Delta rice basket, such a development has the potential to shorten the war significantly.
Coming at the same time as stepped-up pressure in and beyond buffer zones controlled by the KIA, TNLA and KNLA, it is an altogether open question whether the regime could withstand the disruption, let alone loss, of key industrial and agricultural centers without recognizing the need for a change of course.
Whether such a tipping point might involve the departure of SAC supremo and armed forces commander Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, or a call for negotiations, or both, is impossible to predict.
But with large-scale guerrilla operations driven by powerful EROs now threatening the core territories of a politically and economically bankrupt regime, it could well come before the SAC’s electoral ploy tentatively scheduled for the end of this year.