Myanmar's Fluid War Edging Toward An Endgame

2025-02-18 05:01:52

(MENAFN- Asia Times) 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.

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