As torrential monsoon rains give way to the year-end cold season, a central question looms heavily over the war in Myanmar: is time on the side of federal-democratic forces battling the State Administration Council (SAC) military coup regime? Or, rephrased, can the remarkable military momentum achieved by those forces over the last year be maintained in the year to come?
Given an interplay of multiple domestic and external factors, some “known unknowns” and other “unknown unknowns”, there are today no clear answers to the question in either formulation. But two overarching realities that before long will inevitably – and probably decisively – impact the war are already in full view.
The first is that the rebel victories of the yearlong 1027 campaign launched on October 27, 2023, were won in the borderlands of Shan, Kachin and Rakhine states, where well-organized ethnic forces configured as battalions and brigades with clear lines of command executed coordinated operations.
They were also able to absorb a level of casualties never publicly revealed but which in certain engagements, notably the month-long battle for Lashio city in Shan state and brutally protracted sieges around army strongpoints in Rakhine state, undoubtedly cost thousands of lives.
In contrast, the war in the coming year will be fought primarily in the national heartland of central Myanmar by a far less capable or organized cohort of ethnic majority Bamar Peoples Defense Forces (PDFs).
Indeed, this shift has already begun with PDF forces moving within rocket range of Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city, while in neighboring Sagaing region PDFs loyal to the shadow National Unity Government (NUG) and supported by the long-running ethnic forces of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) overran the strategically important town of Pinlebu on October 8.
Window of opportunity
The second stark reality now shaping the conflict is that the SAC military is gearing up to fight for its survival. The unprecedented blows to manpower, materiel and morale of the past year have undoubtedly shaken the regime to the core.
But notwithstanding gung-ho opposition commentary predicting retreat without end and possible regime collapse, there is little evidence to suggest that the discipline and cohesion that has underpinned the military for seven decades has evaporated in a single year.
At the same time, improvements on the battlefield are already being accelerated in a regrouping process that will likely only pick up over the coming year.
Against the backdrop of ramped-up diplomatic, material and advisory support from Russia and China, the military continues to push ahead with a conscription drive that is now in its sixth iteration. Initiated in April, it has, on paper at least, dragooned over 20,000 new recruits into the army’s depleted ranks.
How effectively this desperately needed infusion of manpower translates into battlefield capability remains to be tested. And that test will be difficult to measure given that newly trained draftees, however reluctant, are being deployed to bolster battalions already in the field rather than forming new units that might break and run at the first opportunity.
But as Joseph Stalin famously noted of technically inferior Soviet tank power thrown against the German panzers of World War II, “quantity has a quality of its own.” History proved the wily Soviet dictator right.
At the tactical level, the army’s new directorate for unmanned aerial warfare is boosting the impact of the SAC’s largely unchallenged airpower. Established earlier this year to accelerate the induction of drones to front-line battalions, the directorate is already benefitting from Chinese material support.
Russian expertise derived from the war in Ukraine is also almost certainly playing into a drone war in which opposition forces no longer dominate Myanmar’s battlespaces.
That said, while these and other improvements to the SAC’s sagging capabilities will likely gain traction over the coming year, it is still safe to argue that none has yet achieved a critical mass that alone or in combination could provide a decisive advantage over an emboldened resistance.
In the national heartland, often demoralized regime garrisons remain bunkered in mainly defensive mode. And where in the borderlands the army plans major counteroffensives in the coming weeks, lack of manpower, mechanized mobility and experience in combined-arms operations all militate against any dramatic or even significant rebounds.
A more likely prospect is of army advances bogging down in grinding battles of attrition that further drain manpower and morale. That scenario is already frustrating regime counterthrusts around the approaches to Mandalay, in Nawnghkio township on the Shan plateau to the east of the city and in Madaya on the Ayeyarwady River to the north.
At the same time, China’s ambitious effort to shut down the war in the north by closing its borders to fuel, munitions and medicine shipments that earlier reached the opposition tripartite Brotherhood Alliance and KIA in Kachin state is in its earliest stages.
Even assuming a 2,200-kilometer border can be effectively and indefinitely sealed – an improbable scenario – the impact of the embargo on front-line opposition forces will be mitigated over the coming months by the vast quantities of munitions captured from the Myanmar Army during Operation 1027.
Equally, it remains to be seen whether Chinese scolding and threats can effectively rein in the lively commercial instincts of the United Wa State Army (UWSA), the well-stocked and ostensibly neutral faction that has long profited from its role as a back-room quartermaster for ethnic armed factions in northern Myanmar.
Against this backdrop, the current balance of forces leaves open a clear window of opportunity for the opposition to exploit the momentum gained in the year of Operation 1027 and press home its advantage before a still-stumbling enemy has the opportunity to regain its balance.
How long that window will remain open is difficult to gauge. But it is almost certainly safe to predict that Myanmar’s loose federal-democratic alliance, severely challenged by a lack of external material and diplomatic support, does not have another three or four years to put in place the prerequisites for a military victory. More likely, it has only one or, at most, two.
Regular forces
The most immediate and pressing task for the opposition in the Myanmar heartland – the cockpit of conflict in 2025 – will be to draw on locally based PDFs as building blocks to field regular units, without which concentrations of Myanmar Army forces cannot be defeated.
Establishing regular forces organized into battalions and brigades and under command-and-control exercised first at district and then regional levels would imply a resistance recognition that the war fought over the past three years must evolve if it’s not to stall.
Raised spontaneously for local defense and hit-and-run attacks, PDFs are neither structured nor commanded for the coordinated mobile operations now indispensable in a conflict that the successes of 1027 and a shrinking window of opportunity have propelled into a broadly offensive phase.
The urgency of organizing regular forces was paradoxically on full display at the recent opposition victory at Pinlebu. If reports from the field are accurate, the town’s capture was undertaken by manpower from around 50 different PDFs pulled into the battle from over ten townships stretching across Sagaing region. It came as the culmination of a 53-day campaign commenced in mid-August.
While a tribute to revolutionary solidarity, this “all pile in” approach to offensive operations is not a serious template for fighting a war against both a ticking clock and an army dug in across scores of towns and cities. Pinlebu’s capture was also backed by KIA regular units, which operate in northern Sagaing but whose support and advice cannot be counted on further south.
Similar problems with less positive outcomes have also been apparent in Mandalay region, where PDFs launched the “Myingyan District Special Operation” (MDSO) in mid-August. In a well-coordinated, if brief campaign, local groups overran positions in several adjacent townships before retreating in the face of regime airpower and intervention by rapidly concentrated ground forces.
More recently, on October 21, the town of Ngan Myar Gyi, captured on August 19 as part of the MDSO, was retaken by a concerted regime operation involving ground forces, air strikes and naval bombardment from the Ayeyarwady River.
The conclusion to be drawn from these examples is unambiguous: Without the direct support of major ethnic actors, PDFs have neither the organizational resilience nor the logistical wherewithal to resist, let alone defeat, Myanmar Army forces.
Over the coming year, failure to draw on the best of PDF manpower and equipment and prioritize the formation of new regular battalions configured for mobile offensive operations beyond local boundaries and command structures likely risks strategic defeat over the long term.
Piecemeal reverses on the battlefield, popular exhaustion, and before long, the lure of SAC-sponsored “militia” status for business-minded PDFs will only be compounded by external factors. The acclaim, grudging or enthusiastic, with which an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-led international community will greet the travesty of SAC-staged “elections” in 2025 is only the most obvious.
Battalion building blocks
In the dry season months ahead, it is unlikely that even newly constituted regular forces would be capable of overrunning and holding urban centers of any importance. If rebel attempts to storm towns would arguably be unwise, any assault on a major city of the size of Mandalay could prove disastrous.
If properly equipped and deployed, however, regular units could prove crucially effective in maintaining the momentum of 1027 with high-profile and ideally well-coordinated attacks on the vital arteries of a severely overstretched regime.
The interdiction of key lines of transport and communication that slowly confines the military to islands of urban control would ideally be stiffened by raids in force on airbases, munition production plants and fuel convoys.
The failure to date to launch serious attacks on airbases has been one of the more remarkable aspects of the war and stems directly from the lack of local PDF capacity and strategic direction.
Virtually by default, the lead actor in addressing the challenge of forming regular forces will be the NUG, the only entity with broad enough legitimacy and some degree of authority in the Bamar heartland.
While the target of persistent sniping from its critics, the NUG’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) has already extended financial and logistical support to some but not all PDFs across much of central Myanmar and nominally re-badged them as “battalions.”
Several other armed Bamar actors could also play a critical role as core elements in building a new force structure. One is the Bamar People’s Liberation Army (BPLA), a group originally based in eastern Karen state where it was trained by cadres of the ethnic Rakhine Arakan Army.
Over the past years, the BPLA has gained combat experience in northern Shan state as part of the 1027 campaign. Its leader, Maung Saung Kha, has recently repeated his intention of redeploying a claimed force of 1,200 troops back into the Myanmar heartland.
The Mandalay PDF (MDY-PDF) has emerged as another potent player. Since abandoning dreams of urban guerrilla warfare in Mandalay city, the group has trained and grown under the tutelage of the powerful Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) in hill-country on the borders of Mandalay region and Shan state.
While recognizing the authority of the NUG, the MDY-PDF – now numbering at least 3,000 trained regulars – operates alongside the TNLA and under its command-and-control.
Since July this year, it has pushed south along the east bank of the Ayeyarwady River to threaten Mandalay city and potentially extend its influence into the army-dominated flatlands south of the city where MDSO took place.
Other smaller semi-regular groups include the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) under the TNLA’s operational umbrella and the All-Burma Students Democratic Front (ABSDF), a longstanding faction of several hundred troops with significant combat experience gained alongside the KIA in intense battles in the Indaw and Tigyaing regions of northeast Sagaing.
Who’s command-and-control?
The central resistance dilemma of 2025, however, will turn less on manpower than on command-and-control and by extension issues of personality and politics that may yet come to define the tragedy of a failed revolution.
The key questions are easily posed: Does the NUG’s MoD have the vision, authority and organizational capacity to assume a point role in pursuit of strategic operations in the national heartland?
Could an open-door “coalition of the willing” form a joint headquarters under NUG auspices bringing together chiefs-of-staff from key commands, Bamar and ethnic?
Will powerful ethnic armies be willing to share either direct command-and-control or operational influence over ethnic Bamar PDFs that could form the nucleus of regular forces in the heartland?
Would the BPLA or ABSDF be willing to recognize the command authority of either the NUG or a joint HQ or, alternatively, insist on operational autonomy?
What is not in question is that to prevail against the SAC in the majority Bamar heartland, where the military is most deeply entrenched, Myanmar’s federal-democratic opposition will soon need to field regular forces for coordinated operations using building blocks that are already largely in place.
Political failure to unite around that military objective will likely lead to spreading confusion, strategic incoherence and ultimately a defeat that leaves a blood-soaked military dictatorship in place.
Anthony Davis is a Bangkok-based analyst with Janes security and defense publications.