The road to a resistance victory in Myanmar

In major cities around Myanmar’s war-torn borderlands, a pattern is emerging. From Myitkyina and Bhamo in northern Kachin state to Lashio in northeastern Shan, and Sittwe, on the Bay of Bengal in the west, the Myanmar Army is pulling back into urban bastions shielded by air power, artillery and plentiful supplies of ammunition.

Driven by eight months of serial defeat at the hands of ethnic minority insurgent armies, the country’s embattled State Administration Council (SAC) junta is shifting slowly but surely to what can best be described as a porcupine strategy – curling up on itself behind an array of lethally sharp quills.

Whether this war plan offers a viable path for regime survival will likely be decided in the coming months as what began early this year in the ethnic borderlands becomes an increasingly nationwide phenomenon. Indeed, in central Myanmar, the porcupine’s shift towards the national heartland has already begun.

Since June 25 ethnic Palaung insurgents of the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and their ethnic Bamar People’s Defense Force (PDF) allies have begun pressing army forces back toward Mandalay, Myanmar’s ancient royal capital, with offensives in Madaya township immediately north of the city and towards Pyin Oo Lwin, home to the military’s prestigious Defense Services Academy (DSA) that overlooks Mandalay from hills to the east.

The military’s grinding retreat into apparently impregnable urban strongholds is a less conscious strategy than a chaotic response to an aggressive advance of resistance forces that shows no sign of easing. But even if enforced rather than planned, the emerging urban porcupine offers three distinct layers of advantage.

Militarily, it invites the opposition to come down from the hills and jungles of the borderlands and meet the army on the plains and rice paddies around large cities where the army’s overwhelming superiority in artillery, armor and air power will be most lethally effective. Provided it can be concentrated to effect, such firepower stands to decimate ill-equipped and loosely coordinated PDFs.

Politically, the SAC’s grip on urban areas maintains control over the majority of Myanmar’s population and offers the foundations for fresh elections planned for next year – the only viable exit strategy for a military that has been trapped in a catastrophic political cul-de-sac since the coup of February 2021.

Diplomatically, meanwhile, if some form of electoral process – however transparently constrained and flawed – can be staged, the pseudo-civilian administration that emerges may manage to buy the military sufficient time to win at an internationally-brokered negotiating table what it currently risks losing on the battlefield.

Certainly, Myanmar’s key neighbors, China, India and Thailand, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc more generally will waste little time in endorsing the polls and expanding engagement with any administration dressed in civilian longyis rather than military khakis. Once that engagement gathers traction, it seems likely enough that the West will slowly, if grudgingly, fall into line.

Myanmar junta leader Min Aung Hlaing is on the ropes. Photo: Asia Times Files / AFP / Sefa Karacan / Anadolu Agency

The overarching question for the coming year is whether the SAC’s porcupine strategy anchored on the cities of the populous national heartland can sustain a military stand-off for long enough to ensure the military’s ongoing central role in Myanmar’s governance that it sees as its prerogative.

At the beginning of the rainy season of 2024, it would be foolhardy to suggest a clear answer. There is certainly nothing inevitable about the survival of a beleaguered military regime overstretched and exhausted by unprecedented challenges that continue to mount.

Conflict endgames in Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975 and Afghanistan in 1992 and 2021 point to an irrefutable lesson: well-equipped militaries enjoying foreign backing but anchored on the defense of shrinking urban enclaves can be overwhelmed by ubiquitous and relentless resistance forces to the point of disintegration and collapse.

Equally, there is nothing preordained about the success of Myanmar’s federal-democratic resistance. Despite enjoying wide popular support, the “Spring Revolution” continues to lack the most important prerequisites for revolutionary victory: a vanguard political party capable of imposing strategic coherence and direction, charismatic leadership able to inspire and rally, and an external backer willing to provide material and diplomatic support.

Two strategic approaches

Against this fluid backdrop, two key variables will be critical in shaping Myanmar’s chaotic battlespace over the coming year. Unknowns today, both will be on full display by the beginning of 2025.

First, and perhaps the more crucial, is the extent to which opposition forces adopt a direct or indirect approach towards the SAC’s porcupine strategy.

A direct approach would involve PDF forces, either affiliated with the National Unity Government (NUG) or independent of it, attempting to launch attacks on large urban centers and risk being slaughtered in front of the military’s big guns with potentially disastrous implications for resistance morale that since 2021 has weathered three and half years of conflict remarkably well.

The NUG’s Ministry of Defense’s tendency to date has typically been to compensate for what it lacks in material resources and effective command and control with politically rousing calls for “victory within a year.” There is no guarantee that the MoD, where real military experience is in short supply, will not continue to press ahead with calls for stirring but unrealistic objectives.

By contrast, an indirect approach would involve a multi-pronged effort aimed at dividing and exhausting already depleted regime forces. Requiring only minimal coordination, the primary operational focus would not be around urban areas but rather – and especially in the coming months – on the strategic road, rail and riverine lines of communications that connect them.

In short, a war for the roads needs to precede any war for the cities. By triggering internal collapse through blocked supply routes, resistance forces could avoid the need for a war for the cities. It was not by chance that in the examples from Indochina and Afghanistan noted above, all three capitals of Saigon, Phnom Penh and Kabul, and most provincial centers, fell to anti-government forces with little or no fighting.

The topography of central Myanmar offers a remarkably favorable setting for such a strategic approach. Main north-south lines of communication along the Ayeyarwaddy and Sittaung river valleys are hemmed in to the west by mountains of the Arakan Yoma and Chin Hills, to the east by the Karen hills and along the central spine of the country by the Bago Yoma.

What begins with small-unit hit-and-run ambush and harassment escalates into a war of attrition along lines of communication and supply lines critical for the delivery of crucial fuel and munitions. The process sees an incumbent regime being drawn into exhausting and costly operations to hold open and then re-open major arteries while being forced to abandon minor roads and lose smaller towns for lack of troops to defend them.

To a degree, such a strategy has already emerged by default over the past dry season along the major highway connecting SAC-held centers in the southern Tanintharyi panhandle along the Andaman Sea coast and with escalating sabotage of the Yangon-Mawlamyine and Yangon Mandalay railway lines.

Myanmar’s anti-SAC resistance could seek to replicate past war-winning strategies in the region. Image: X Screengrab

But achieving strategic traction in the coming months would undoubtedly require larger mobile resistance units severing roads for days at a stretch; ambushing in strength and at points of their own choosing regime response units; and then disappearing into nearby hills before repeating the process elsewhere.

Such tactics would mirror operations launched in early 1944 by British Chindit columns operating behind the lines of the Japanese Imperial Army in the Indaw region of northern Sagaing, which cut its supply routes to lethal effect.

Other elements of an indirect approach would include mounting pressure on outlying townships in which the regime lacks the manpower to retake once lost, and destabilizing guerrilla attacks inside major cities where the SAC is already facing daunting economic strains and, before long, the challenge posed by large restless populations.

The ethnic variable

The second variable hinges on a decision that the leaderships of key ethnic resistance organizations, most notably Kachin, Karen, Ta’ang and Rakhine, will need to make soon if they have not already done so.

Historic in its ramifications, that decision hinges simply on what approach better serves the long-term interests of any ethnic community in relation to who holds power in the country’s Bamar heartland.

One option would involve increased support for allied PDFs in the shape of munitions, advisors and training that could fuel an indirect strategy and decisively tip the military balance against the SAC, likely ushering in an interim administration centered on the NUG.

The alternative would be based on an assessment that ethnic interests are better served by formalizing with the SAC an autonomy already largely won on the battlefield while accepting the risk of leaving an unreformed if weakened military in the national driving seat.

In mid-late 2024, the reality is almost certainly that either a wait-and-see or a hedging approach on the part of the ethnic armies would be objectively more likely to favor the survival of the SAC porcupine than the success of under-equipped and ill-directed PDFs.

These variables will play out against the backdrop of the military’s Achilles Heel: its manpower shortfall. What has been a persistent problem over the past two decades with infantry battalions typically numbering around 200 men rather than the prescribed 827 is today a crisis with potentially terminal implications.

The frantic scramble to accelerate conscription since the introduction of the People’s Military Service Law last February has given the lie to the Wikipedia mythology of a 350,000-400,000 strong Tatmadaw—figures, which to the extent they were ever true, emerged from calculations based on units at full strength and included the military’s notoriously bloated tail of non-combat branches – administrative, commercial, technical and medical.

Today, almost all credible assessments of the army’s combat-capable strength made by Myanmar and foreign analysts coalesce around a figure somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 troops.

Not as large as advertised: Myanmar soldiers on parade in Naypyidaw in a March 2023 photo. Image: Xinhua News Agency / X Screengrab

The shortfall in raw numbers is exacerbated by two factors. The first is structural: a pattern of penny-packet battalion-size deployments across 14 regional military commands driven by the essentially political need to garrison the population of the entire country, not least in ethnic regions, rather than defend against foreign aggression.

The second driver, highlighted by recent dry season campaigns in Rakhine and Kachin states, is operational: a stubborn unwillingness to temporarily surrender territory in the interest of regrouping forces for counteroffensives.

The result, again and again, has seen isolated battalions or larger tactical operations commands (TOCs) fighting until they have either been overrun or surrender while the hemorrhaging of numbers continues apace.

Indeed, the military now faces the risk that current battlefield losses may soon be outpacing the advertised 5,000 man-per-month rate of induction of new conscripts – even assuming draftees with no combat experience have some enthusiasm for the fight.

A resistance strategy targeted squarely over the rest of this year on corridors of communication and supply rather than SAC-held urban porcupines would be well-calculated to act as a further accelerant to the army’s escalating manpower crisis.

Whether such a strategy will be adopted, however, or whether Myanmar’s key ethnic armies, whose role on the national stage is now decisive, will be willing to support it is anything but guaranteed.