Coup maker Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s allies want the world to believe that Myanmar’s military is “on the upswing” and “mounting a comeback” in a war that foreign media increasingly describe as “forgotten.”
Recent US media coverage leans into that storyline, highlighting tactical gains, diplomatic outreach, and a presidential façade after tightly controlled elections. To outside observers, it can sound as though the junta has reversed the tide (NPR).
Inside the country, the picture looks different. The military has more firepower than its opponents and has clawed back specific towns. But it is not winning the war that matters: the contest over territory, basic governance, and political consent. On those fronts, the fundamentals still run against Min Aung Hlaing’s post-election administration (CFR).
The territorial map is the clearest corrective. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Conflict Tracker, drawing on a BBC World Service investigation, estimates that the junta fully controls only about 21% of Myanmar’s territory, while resistance forces and ethnic armed organizations hold roughly 42%, with the rest contested (BBC).
In the west, the Arakan Army has taken most of Rakhine State and Paletwa Township in neighboring Chin State, and by late 2024 controlled 13 of Rakhine’s 17 townships, including the entire Bangladesh border (CSIS). ACLED reports the Arakan Army has since extended operations into Bago, Magway, and Ayeyarwady and now functions as the de facto government in western Myanmar (ACLED).
Honest analysis must concede that the junta has scored real, recent gains. With heavy Chinese support, it recaptured Kyaukme and Hsipaw in northern Shan State in October 2025, restoring the corridor to the Chinese border, and retook Lashio in April 2025 after the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army withdrew under Beijing’s pressure (BBC).
New tactics, tens of thousands of conscripts, Chinese and Russian drones and unprecedented air power have shifted momentum in specific theaters. None of this is in dispute. The question is whether it adds up to a strategic reversal. It does not, and for three main reasons.
First, recovered territory has not translated into restored governance. The Chinese-brokered Lashio handover left hundreds of surrounding villages outside junta authority and was accompanied by resentment over Beijing’s coercion rather than a stable return to order (SAC-M).
Across much of the country, law and order remain fractured, public services degraded, and administrative reach thin (BTI). That is nominal control without durable state power.
Second, the military’s growing dependence on air power underlines the weakness rather than masking it. Fortify Rights documented 304 paramotor and gyrocopter attacks on civilians across Sagaing, Magway, Mandalay, Ayeyarwady and Bago between December 2024 and January 2026, with peaks coinciding with election rounds (Fortify Rights).
Human Rights Watch documented escalating airstrikes, artillery, and drone attacks across all 14 states and regions in 2025 (HRW). Late-stage counterinsurgencies often look strongest from the air precisely when they are weakest on the ground.
Myanmar is not Vietnam, but the underlying lesson holds: more bombing does not prove more control, and firepower cannot by itself restore political legitimacy (Mitchell Institute).
Third, the economic and geopolitical dimension undercuts the comeback thesis where it should be strongest.
India’s outreach to Naypyidaw — rupee-kyat trade settlement, the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway, energy and mining cooperation — runs into the same obstacle as every other corridor: the formal counterpart in the capital often does not control the territory the projects must cross (Rediff). The Kaladan route runs through townships now held by the Arakan Army, not the junta (ACLED).
The same logic shapes the rare-earth conversation. CSIS has warned that courting the junta for rare-earth access amounts to betting on the weaker side (CSIS). After the Kachin Independence Army seized Chipwi and Pangwa in late 2024, it became the de facto authority — and tax collector — over Myanmar’s heavy rare-earth corridor along the China border (Asia Times).
A June 2026 Foreign Policy report quoted former US Chargé d’Affaires in Myanmar, Susan Stevenson, describing Myanmar’s rare-earth sourcing as “more of a pipe dream than a realistic proposition” because much of the resource base lies outside junta control (Foreign Policy).
The NPR piece’s hardest claim — that ethnic armed organizations with Chinese ties have “turned off the spigot” of arms to People’s Defense Forces and that some opposition forces are “beginning to collapse” — deserves a direct answer (NPR). Some of that is real and serious. China has clearly pressured groups along its border.
But the resistance architecture is not collapsing; it is reconfiguring. In March 2026, the National Unity Government, the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, and major ethnic revolutionary organizations — the Karen National Union, Kachin Independence Organization, Karenni National Progressive Party, and Chin National Front — formed the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union to coordinate political and military strategy for a federal democratic order (SAC-M).
The Arakan Army has not publicly joined but cooperates militarily with the Chin Brotherhood and other resistance actors. Survey data cited by CFR indicate roughly 93 percent of respondents inside Myanmar view the NUG favorably (CFR). The pattern is uneven coordination among actors who still hold real ground, not resistance collapse.
If relevance is measured only by diplomatic protocol, Min Aung Hlaing’s administration can appear to be regaining ground. If relevance is measured by who can shape Myanmar’s eventual political settlement, secure and tax territory, govern communities, sustain trade routes, and command consent, resistance actors remain structurally central (Al Jazeera).
The risk of the “military comeback” narrative is therefore not just analytical. It encourages foreign governments, investors, and strategists to misread Myanmar as a normalizing authoritarian state rather than a fractured war zone where coercive reach and legitimacy have sharply diverged.
That misreading produces poor choices: premature normalization, corridor projects built on paper sovereignty and extractive deals that deepen instability in the name of realism (Foreign Policy).
Myanmar’s generals have improved their international posture – but posture is not tantamount to power. They have not shown that airstrikes can be converted into stable territorial recovery, that elections held under military domination can manufacture consent or that diplomatic theater can solve the counterparty problem at the heart of Myanmar’s transit and extraction economy.
The more defensible conclusion is not that the military is on the upswing, but that outside actors are once again mistaking optics for control.
James Shwe is a Myanmar American professional engineer and advocate for democracy in Myanmar, affiliated with the Los Angeles Myanmar Movement.
