(MENAFN- Asia Times) Over a month after the launch of the most successful campaign by anti-junta resistance forces in Myanmar's civil war, some overarching realities are emerging from events that have been widely hailed as a turning point in the conflict.
The most important is arguably the least obvious: the dangers of triumphalism and a rush to victory by guerrilla forces that are militarily still ill-prepared to confront a trained army in conventional combat.
Those dangers are arguably today playing out on the streets of Loikaw, the capital of eastern Karenni state, and in other smaller towns where lightly armed fighters have been thrown into battles against heavy artillery and unremitting air strikes launched by a military that appears unconvinced by reports of its own imminent demise.
As widely reported and opined, the sweeping insurgent offensive across the north of Shan state by the tripartite Brotherhood Alliance of Kokang Chinese, Palaung and Rakhine ethnic insurgents which opened on October 27 was unprecedented on a range of levels.
Operation 1027, named after its launch date, seized a string of towns along the Chinese border, claimed to have overrun up to 200 military posts and bases capturing huge stocks of munitions, and saw the surrender of three Myanmar army battalions.
Even in the darkest days of early 1968 when Communist Party of Burma (CPB) forces surged into northeastern Shan state from launchpads inside China, the Myanmar Army had never suffered such a rapid and crushing series of defeats.
But northern Shan state is not Myanmar and to imagine that the conditions that produced these successes can be easily replicated in very different operational contexts in other parts of the country is surely illusory.
The 1027 campaign's striking advances emerged from three essential factors: surprise and coordination at the strategic level and sophisticated deployment of armed drones that compensated significantly for a lack of artillery at the tactical level.
Brought to fruition over many months of planning , these factors were peculiar to 1027 and it is worth examining each in turn. The element of surprise was strikingly manifested in the first hours and days of the operation and then, as the military reacted, became obviously less important.
The diminishing impact of surprise was clearly reflected in the timelines of key engagements. The fight for the border town of Chin Shwe Haw was won by the Kokang-Chinese Myanmar Nationalities Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) within a matter of hours on the morning of October 27 when the element of surprise was overwhelming.
The battle for the town of Kunlong, home to the main Salween River bridge linking Kokang to the rest of the state, took until November 13 to achieve victory. The final assaults by the ethnic Palaung Ta'ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) that seized the town and base of Mong Kyet came on November 23 after weeks of relentless but ultimately vain military air strikes.
Members of the Ta'ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) ethnic army train at a camp in Myanmar's northern Shan state, March 8, 2023. Image: Twitter Screengrab
At the strategic level, the element of surprise is now long gone. If it was not before, the Myanmar Army is now fully alert, irate and assessing its limited strategic options.
Battlefield coordination between the Brotherhood Alliance, which in addition to the MNDAA and TNLA also includes the ethnic Rakhine Arakan Army (AA), also critically underpinned 1027's success.
But such coordination is not achieved over a few months. Often forgotten amid the current euphoria is that the Brotherhood Alliance has been operating closely together in the relatively narrow battlespace of northern Shan state since at least 2014 – or an entire decade.
The trio's first major joint offensive came in early 2015 with a full-scale though ultimately abortive attempt to seize Kokang from the military. Further coordinated operations followed, most notably in August 2019 when the Brotherhood – for the first time operating under that name – launched a campaign that in many respects served as a test run for 2023's Operation 1027.
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