Disruption (Page 5)

The State Administration Council ( SAC ) junta reversing its downward spiral in the wake of Myanmar’s military coup’s fourth anniversary, decisive Chinese intervention to rescue the regime and its off-ramp election strategy, resistance factions, ethnic and Bamar, sour relations, and bizarre combinations of all the above.

If there’s one word that adequately sums up the war in 2025, it’s “fluidity,” the uncertainty of a fragile balance of common weaknesses and antagonisms that leaves no room for comfortable forecast. Save, that is, for the clarity of the region’s accelerating financial decline and humanitarian crisis.

However, two starkly contrasting floor realities stand out against this shifting landscape. How they communicate with one another in the upcoming months will almost certainly determine the outcome of the conflict, possibly quickly and in a way that will probably foil Beijing’s efforts to implement a Pax Sinica over Myanmar.

The success of racial armies, or so-called cultural revolution organizations, has been the first and most widely praised for using normal forces and manoeuvre 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, theTa’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 ethnic Bamar resistance in Myanmar’s opposition to developing a unified strategy to move a four-year-old guerrilla conflict 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 has been a different reality.

The anti-coup National Unity Government’s Ministry of Defense ( MoD ), a blatantly bureaucratic rather than operational body hampered by a lack of resources ( waffen and money ) and by the near inapprehension of imposing top-down command-and-control on the spontaneous upsurge of popular revolt that characterized the Spring Revolution in 2021, is at the center of the fault.

However, a lack of military experience, tactical vision, and specific personality have also contributed to a floor circumstance that appears unlikely to change in the near future.

Army garrisons with weak morale but rich firepower are more or less firmly buried into urban centers in today’s situation. While somewhat well-armed PDFs are increasingly able to tactically defeat regime forces in freed but institutionally dispersed hinterlands, they remain fundamentally devoid of any overall force structure or corporate plan to remove and defeat them.

The transitional areas where liberated racial territories border the national periphery and border the Myanmar heartland are the key to unlocking this impasse are undoubtedly those keys. These regions have now started to serve as defense buffer zones for tribal borderlands in the face of a perilous future.

ERO buffer zone scheme, which was a natural extension of the temple and education offered to Bamar children fleeing SAC crime in 2021, has involved cultural forces arming, supplying, and directing Bamar PDFs in and out of their own territories. It has also seen ERO products fighting alongside allied PDFs in Myanmar’s plains.

The northern Sagaing place, where the KIA has built up PDFs and participated in the record of Kawlin and Pinlebu, has seen the most buffer zone operations since 2022.

The TNLA’s involvement in mentoring and supporting the Mandalay PDF and moving with it into northern townships of the Mandalay region has been even more impressive in terms of cultural support for a second, somewhat large PDF pressure operating under cultural command-and-control.

The Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA ) has since expanded operations northward on both sides of the river to Toungoo, the military’s Southern Regional Military Command ( RMC), to expand its reach beyond Karen state in the Sittaung valley of east Bago.

The most recent buffer zone established by the AA, first in the Arakan Yoma range’s hills bordering the Magwe and Bago regions with allied Chin PDFs, and then, since January this year, in townships inside the delta region of Ayeyarwady, is arguably the most crucial buffer zone to emerge.

The former area has a view of the Ayeyarwady River valley and Myanmar’s industrial heartland, where the military’s Directorate of Defense Industries ( better known by its Burmese acronym, Ka Pa Sa ), has long run a network of plants whose production of a wide range of munitions ultimately keeps the military on the ground. &nbsp,

Abutting Yangon region, the delta zone constitutes the economically crucial rice basket of Myanmar, an ethnically mixed area where Bamar, Karen and Rakhine communities co-exist and where, in the past, the KNLA has had deep roots.

The rapid response ^that ^the army command in Naypyidaw has responded to recent AA probing attacks reflects ^the strategic importance of bo^th regions. A sizable tactical operations group, consisting of 360 members from ^the Meiktila-based 99^th Light Infantry Division, was dispatched in mid-January to stop ^the AA’s advance across ^the Arakan Yoma, but by ^the first week of February, it had lost ^the majority of its workforce.

As the southwestern RMC attempted to stop AA advances along the Bay of Bengal coast and through the hills toward Thabaung township, reinforcements including a significant armored contingent from Hmawbi were rushed from the Yangon command in early January. Fighting is reportedly ongoing.

It seems unlikely that AA will attempt to storm large population centers in the Bamar heartland, such as Pathein in the Delta or Pyay in the Ayeyarwady valley, at this point in the conflict.

Other allied EROs are subject to similar restrictions. For instance, as part of Beijing’s wider plan to at least ensure the regime’s survival until it can hold the stage-managed elections it has touted since the coup, the TNLA is currently under heavy Chinese diplomatic pressure to reach a ceasefire with the SAC in the north.

However, in what might be referred to as a “buffer zone-plus” strategy, increased AA logistical support for allies reinforced by the insertion of tactical advisory teams and possibly even regular units is likely to result in defensive buffers being extended into areas of offensive guerrilla operations. &nbsp,

Given the strikingly short distances between the Delta rice basket and the strategically important Ayeyarwady Valley industrial belt, which are both strategically and economically important, this development has the potential to significantly shorten the war.

It is still up for debate whether the regime could withstand the disruption, let alone the loss, of significant industrial and agricultural centers if it were occurring at the same time as the stepped-up pressure in and beyond the KIA, TNLA, and KNLA, without acknowledging the need for a change of course.

It’s impossible to say when such a turning point will occur, including the resignation of SAC supremo and commander of the armed forces, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, or the initiation of negotiations, or both. &nbsp,

However, it might happen before the SAC’s electoral ploy tentatively scheduled for the end of this year as large-scale guerrilla operations led by powerful EROs are now threatened the core territories of a politically and economically bankrupt regime. &nbsp,

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