By Naw Betty Han and Shoon Naing
Dec 16 (Reuters) – For seven days, rebel fighter Khant and his comrades held the line as Myanmar’s military pounded their positions with artillery and drone strikes.
Khant is a veteran of numerous battles against Myanmar’s junta since it seized power in a 2021 coup, but he had seen nothing like the intensity of the fighting in central Myanmar in October.
The strikes were followed by wave after wave of infantry, according to Khant and Htike, a fellow rebel who was also present at the battle for Pazun Myaung, a village roughly halfway between Myanmar’s largest city and its political capital.
“It was essentially an offensive using all the power they could muster,” Htike said of one particularly tough five-hour period of fighting.
After a week, the rebels’ losses became too painful to bear and they retreated to a nearby base.
Two years after a major rebel offensive left much of Myanmar’s borderlands in resistance hands, the junta has found its footing on the battlefield, according to Reuters’ interviews with six rebel fighters and three security analysts, including some who interact regularly with the military.
The junta has reshaped its tactics by introducing conscription and expanding its drone fleet, enabling it to reclaim some territory after defeats or stalemates on the battlefield. The generals have also been boosted by the backing of China, which has applied diplomatic and financial pressure on resistance groups to stop fighting.
Three rebel fighters, including Htike and Khant, said they had witnessed the military using “human wave” manoeuvres to overwhelm rebel defences, reflecting new battlefield tactics that have not previously been reported.
“After one soldier died, another one came up to take his place,” said Khant of the October battle, adding that some appeared to be threatened at gunpoint by their commanders. Junta troops had previously been quick to flee once losses started to mount, two rebel fighters told Reuters.
A spokesperson for Myanmar’s military did not respond to questions about changes in its strategy. The National Unity Government, a parallel anti-junta administration that includes members of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s ousted government, also did not return requests for comment.
The changes have helped the military mount a limited comeback in at least three states, according to a November briefing by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. But the junta’s battlefield gains are uneven and it faces various rebel armies that have differing levels of strength, the think-tank said, meaning no single entity dominates frontlines nationwide.
The push by Myanmar’s generals to regain lost territory coincides with a general election scheduled to begin on December 28 that United Nations chief Antonio Guterres and international rights groups have said will be neither free nor fair. Key opposition figures like Suu Kyi remain in detention and many other anti-junta political groups have said they will boycott the election.
The junta is likely to be further emboldened to seek to reclaim more territory as momentum shifts along the frontline, which stretches hundreds of kilometres from China to the Bay of Bengal, said Min Zaw Oo, executive director of the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security think-tank.
“We will see more armed clashes and more attempts from the military to retake territories in the coming three years,” he said.
CONSCRIPTS AND DRONES
Myanmar’s junta made military service mandatory for young people in February 2024, just months after it was battered by a coordinated rebel offensive dubbed Operation 1027.
Since the announcement, 70,000 to 80,000 recruits have entered the military, according to two military defectors and an analyst. The junta has announced roughly 16 rounds of conscription and said it will call up some 5,000 people at a time.
The military has a force of about 134,000, according to an 2025 estimate by the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank in London, down from 400,000 before the coup.
The reinforced units are increasingly led by seasoned officers, following a shake-up triggered by Operation 1027 when rebels captured around 150 military outposts within a month, said Min Zaw Oo.
“There was a period where officers were promoted without having suitable field experience,” said the analyst, adding that he obtained the information from people with direct knowledge of junta personnel changes. “The military took drastic actions to replace a lot of these officers.”
Maj. Naung Yoe, who left the junta after the coup and now researches the civil war, said people with direct knowledge of the postings had told him that more experienced officers were taking over command positions previously handed out based on favouritism.
The junta’s use of patronage-based promotion has been documented by researchers, including those at the U.S. Institute of Peace think-tank and the University of Chicago.
Many units now have more time to rest after long battlefront deployments, something a stretched military had been unable to do in the years immediately after the coup, Min Zaw Oo and Naung Yoe said.
The junta has also built up a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles, including suicide and scouting drones.
The military appears to have access to 19 different UAV models, including fixed-wing and multi-rotor drones made in China, Russia and Iran, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a coalition of international researchers that tracks the Myanmar civil war.
Conventional airstrikes remain the military’s most frequently used tactic in 2025, ACLED data show, though these are now increasingly guided by intelligence gathered from reconnaissance and surveillance drones, said Su Mon, an analyst with the group.
This combination of tactics has led to more precise junta aerial attacks, she said, adding that her assessment was based on a review of media reports and interviews with local combatants.
While resistance groups have access to drones, they are vulnerable to junta UAVs due to a lack of jamming technology and air-defense systems, said Su Mon and two rebel fighters.
The military has also started to allow lower-level commanders to directly request air support that previously required senior approval, enabling airstrikes on enemy defences ahead of infantry assaults, according to the three analysts.
BEIJING’S BACKING
A third element of the junta’s fightback is China.
Beijing has close commercial and cultural ties to some anti-junta resistance groups, but it has historically viewed Myanmar’s generals as guarantors of stability in its backyard.
Chinese officials have helped broker at least two ceasefires in 2024 and 2025, including one that returned to junta control the northeastern town of Lashio, where rebels captured the first regional military command in Myanmar’s history.
China has also leaned on armed groups such as the United Wa State Army to choke the flow of weapons to other resistance units, according to international researchers.
“China froze UWSA-linked assets, imposed border restrictions and demanded that the group cut off supply of weapons to other groups,” the International Crisis Group said in a November briefing on Beijing’s actions to support the junta after mid-2024.
China’s Foreign Ministry and UWSA did not return requests for comment.
In the ruby-mining mountain town of Mogok, Chinese pressure on the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, another militia with ties to Beijing, has restricted the availability of weapons and led to a complete halt in anti-junta resistance operations, local rebel fighter Sanay told Reuters.
A top TNLA official confirmed in a December Facebook post that the group had been forced into a ceasefire by a lack of ammunition and money, but did not elaborate. A spokesperson for the militia previously told Reuters that TNLA had been subject to pressure by Beijing.
“On the other side, the military council is launching offensives with superior forces,” said Sanay, who fights for a militia allied with the TNLA.
“If you look into the underlying reason why we can’t compete and are losing ground in the offensives, it is ultimately due to pressure from China.”
(Additional reporting and writing by Devjyot Ghoshal; Editing by Katerina Ang)
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