After six disastrous months of serial defeat, Myanmar’s military has finally swung back onto the offensive with a high-stakes campaign already teetering precariously between success and further failure.
Troops have been locked for the past three weeks in the army’s single largest operation in decades aimed at pushing back insurgents of the Karen National Union (KNU) and its People Defense Force (PDF) allies and reasserting full control over the economically vital Thai border trade hub of Myawaddy.
Named Operation Aung Zeya in honor of Alaunghpaya, founder of then-Burma’s 18th-century Konbaung dynasty, the campaign comes as the fortunes of the military are arguably at their lowest ebb since the years following Independence in 1948.
The bid to restore the military’s State Administration Council (SAC) regime’s revenue and reputation will have immediate repercussions in Karen state, situated in the country’s eastern region bordering Thailand.
That includes for the military’s fraught relations with its former Border Guard Force (BGF) auxiliaries, now rebranded in “neutral” ethnic colors as the Karen National Army (KNA). In both guises, the force has been focused primarily on profiting from protection offered by its commander Saw Chit Thu to a string of casinos and industrial scam centers run in the Moei River border region by Chinese mafia groups.
Beyond Karen state’s fractured politics, however, the upshot of the current campaign will provide an important bellwether of the SAC’s broader military capabilities following its loss of huge tracts of national borderlands and whether its survival should now best be measured in months or perhaps still years.
Initial objectives of the big push that opened in mid-April were retaking the towns of Kawkareik on the Asian Highway (AH1) to the Thai border and Kawbein on the Gyaing River to the west, which had fallen to ethnic Mon resistance fighters in late March. Kawbein’s capture dangerously exposed the Mon state capital and port city of Mawlamyine just 30 kilometers away.
Those goals were met by April 25 when Kawbein was recaptured by junta forces advancing by land and river. With Kawkareik also secured, Operation Aung Zeya is now more narrowly focused on pushing forces across the spine of the Dawna range that divides the largely destroyed Kawkareik from the Moei River valley and the Thai border at Myawaddy.
Following back-and-forth clashes in April and an opportunistic reframing of “neutrality” by Chit Thu, Myawaddy is currently controlled by the warlord-for-hire’s KNA and a small Myanmar military army garrison enjoying his protection.
All hands on deck
With neither the KNU nor Naypyidaw releasing information from the front lines and apparently no independent reporters on the ground, there is much that is unclear about the status of the hostilities. But three aspects of the fighting are not in doubt and worth underscoring.
First, with operational command in the hands of army commander and SAC No 2 Vice Senior General Soe Win, it is entirely clear the military understands how much hinges on the success of a campaign to which it has committed a significant proportion of its already overstretched resources from both the Mawlamyine-based Southeastern Regional Military Command (RMC) area and well beyond.
Infantry forces reportedly involve elements of three of the ten Light Infantry Divisions (LIDs) that form the army’s mobile assault force, namely the 55th redeployed from its base in southern Shan State; the 22nd based in the Karen state capital of Hpa-an and thus fighting on home-turf; and the 44th based in Thaton in neighboring Mon state.
Troops from the severely depleted Military Operations Command No 12 based on Kawkareik itself are also likely involved, making for a total force of up to nine (Myanmar Army-size) battalions or between 1,000 and 1,300 troops.
Armor from Mawlamyine has consisted of around 20 Ukrainian-built BTR-3U armored personnel carriers (APCs) and some smaller Russian BRDM scout cars. Artillery support has come in the shape of 122mm and 240mm truck-mounted multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), the latter a North Korean system with a range of up to 40 kilometers.
The Myanmar Air Force (MAF), meanwhile, has committed a predictably wide range of aircraft. Russian-built Yak-130 light attack jets and Mi-35 Hind gunships, the workhorses of its close air support (CAS) operations, have been reinforced by older Russian Mig-29 interceptors, and – unusually – by Sino-Pakistani built multi-purpose JF-17 jets which had been grounded over technical problems since their acquisition before the 2021 coup but are now being thrown into the fight.
In an additional reflection of an increasingly desperate struggle first seen in Shan state last November, the MAF has also deployed Chinese twin-engine turbo-prop Harbin Y-12 light transports as “bombers” with aircrew apparently dropping 82mm or 120mm mortar rounds out of the aircraft’s side door by hand.
Grinding slowly forward
The second aspect of the campaign worth noting is speed – or lack thereof. Having begun with operations to secure an operational launch pad around Kawkareik town, Operation Aung Zeya has involved an advance into the Dawna Range hills along two main axes, the relatively new AH1 highway completed in 2015 and an older much rougher road that crosses the mountains to the north. How far the military is using a jungle track suitable only for infantry further north is still unclear.
On both main road axes, the advance appears to have been grindingly slow with some reports suggesting that after two weeks of clashes, troops on the southern AH1 may only just have reached a halfway mark near the Taw Naw waterfalls.
Several factors appear to be conspiring against the army in a situation where an offensive against guerrilla forces should be based on a decisive application of mass and speed – particularly on narrow lines of advance through terrain that favors enemy harassment.
One is the perennial issue of morale which between late October last year and March has been severely battered by defeats in Shan, Rakhine and Kachin states. Losses suffered to date in the current operation will not have improved the situation.
Given the level of forces and firepower involved over three weeks, it would be surprising if the army had not suffered at least 300 men killed and wounded. Karen and PDF casualties are almost certainly fewer but unlikely to be light.
Beyond brittle morale, however, an almost certainly more important factor turns on the army’s yawning inexperience in conducting combined-arms warfare that requires the integration of infantry, armor, artillery and air power to achieve effective fire and movement.
Such integration in fluid combat situations poses complex challenges for even technologically advanced armed forces. But as evidenced by commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s repeated public statements in pre-coup years on the need to build a “standard army”, Myanmar’s armed forces, or Tatmadaw, are nowhere near qualifying as a modern war-fighting machine.
For most of its history, the army has campaigned as a light infantry force conducting “clearance operations” against ethnic guerrillas and their civilian supporters. Primarily dependent on mortars carried by porters or mules, those operations were also occasionally supported by field artillery and then with increasing regularity from around 2012 by relatively small infusions of newly purchased airpower.
Large-scale live-fire exercises on the army’s training grounds outside the garrison city of Meiktila, often involving a full panoply of mechanized infantry supported by newly acquired armor, artillery, and low-flying jets and gunships, reflected efforts to practice modern joint warfare.
But while impressively choreographed drills across flat terrain and with no opposition served to showcase the new-era Tatmadaw for state-run TV, their utility as preparation for real-world combat in the Karen hills has been less obvious.
Perhaps most notable in Operation Aung Zeya’s context has been a striking and curious absence of main battle tanks (MBTs). If deployed in numbers and in coordination with artillery and air strikes, tanks offer the firepower and speed to spearhead a rapid advance followed by infantry in armored personnel carriers and on foot. The Ukrainian armored personnel carriers apparently committed to lead the advance – with several already knocked out – are no substitute for far better-armored tanks.
Closely related to the issue of speed, a third problem confronting army commanders hinges on time: the onset of monsoon rain and low clouds later this month will quickly complicate logistics, air support and off-road movement of combat vehicles. Failure to reach the eastern side of the Dawna Range in the coming few weeks risks stalling the entire campaign.
Offensive scenarios
Looking forward, it is probably safe to say that by the end of May Operation Aung Zeya will almost certainly have ended in one of three ways, each with very different implications for the future.
The first is that by dint of firepower, numbers and persistence, the army succeeds in punching its way across the Dawna range to retake its former bases in the town of Thin Gan Nyi Naung, which fell to the KNU and PDFs in March, and then push forward to Myawaddy, 10 kilometers away.
The second is that the losses suffered in the mountains halt the army’s advance and force it to fall back to regroup around Kawkareik for the rainy season.
The third is that the KNLA and its PDF allies succeed not only in checking the army’s advance but also manage to trigger a retreat that pushes the military out of Kawkareik and back down the road towards the Karen state capital of Hpa’an, 88 kilometers to the west, either in a chaotic rout or more slowly over the monsoon months.
The first scenario would imply a hugely needed morale boost and breathing space for a regime that is far from reconciled to the purported inevitability of its defeat. It would also serve to shore up its credibility with neighbors in India, China and Thailand whose diplomatic and material support over the past three years has lately been undermined by growing skepticism about the SAC’s staying power.
Locally, however, a victorious advance to Myawaddy would confront the SAC with a precarious balancing act required to re-establish a sustainable modus vivendi with Karen warlord Chit Thu.
On the one hand, the supportive “neutrality” of his 5,000-strong KNA will be central to army hopes of reestablishing itself on the border and beating back the KNU. On the other, the SAC remains under heavy pressure from China, whose support remains critical for its survival, to shut down the criminal scam centers that have become Chit Thu’s primary revenue stream.
Two factors might serve to mitigate or altogether obviate this dilemma. One might be a change of policy by the Thai government aimed at reining in its own border authorities and telecom corporations which remain deeply complicit in facilitating the supply of construction materials, electricity, internet connectivity and prison labor to the criminal enterprises situated a stone’s throw across the kingdom’s river border with Myanmar. A Thai crackdown would effectively relieve Naypyidaw of the risk of antagonizing Chit Thu itself.
The other would be the assassination of Chit Thu, an entirely plausible, even likely end for a warlord-cum-mafia boss ruling a criminal enclave whose capacity for serial betrayal has created numerous powerful enemies on virtually all sides of a complex and murky struggle.
Retreat to Kawkareik, meanwhile, would mean yet another blow to the army’s credibility and imply the need to defend the town and its road link to Hpa-an against ongoing guerrilla harassment, thus precluding any possibility of restoring the flow of trade to and from the Thai border.
The third scenario – the eviction of the army from Kawkareik and the loss of many of the forces committed to date – would amount to a military disaster with potentially dire consequences.
Most immediately it would threaten an arc of three regime-held towns further west: Hpa-an on the main highway to Yangon; the town of Kawbein south of the highway, already once overrun by resistance forces; and the town of Hlaingbwe to the north of the highway.
Losses on this scale are not yet inevitable but the proximity of these centers to road and rail links between Mawlamyine and Yangon certainly reflects the strategically precarious situation the SAC now confronts.
Whether finally the regime will crumble piecemeal, implode at its center or battle its way into 2025 amid mounting carnage is impossible to predict. But in the coming weeks, the fate of Operation Aung Zeya will powerfully influence those likely endgames.