A design is emerging in major cities near Myanmar’s war-torn borders. From Myitkyina and Bhamo in northeastern Kachin state to Lashio in northern Shan, and Sittwe, on the Bay of Bengal in the west, the Myanmar Army is pulling up into urban paragons shielded by air power, artillery and copious supplies of ammunition.
The nation’s troubled State Administration Council ( SAC ) junta is slowly but surely shifting, best described as a porcupine strategy, curling up on itself behind an array of lethally sharp quills, after eight months of repeat defeat at the hands of ethnic minority insurgent armies.
As what started early this year in the tribal borderlands turns out to be an extremely national trend, whether this battle program offers a practical path for regime survival will likely be decided in the forthcoming months. However, in northern Myanmar, the porcupine’s move towards the federal hinterland has now begun.
With offensives in Madaya township, which is directly north of Mandalay, and in Pyin Oo Lwin, the military’s prestigious Defense Services Academy ( DSA ), ethnic Palaung insurgents from the Ta’ang National Liberation Army ( TNLA ) and their ethnic Bamar People’s Defense Force ( PDF) allies, have begun pressing army forces back toward the ancient royal capital on June 25.
The government’s grinding retreat into an ostensibly unmanageable industrial stronghold is a less conscious choice than a turbulent response to an intense advance of resistance forces that shows no sign of slowing down. But even if enforced instead than planned, the emerging industrial quill offers three different layers of benefit.
Militarily, it invites the opposition to cross the borderlands ‘ hills and forests to meet with the troops on the prairies and rice ricefields, where the military’s enormous advantage in terms of artillery, weapons, and heat energy will be most potently used. For power is guaranteed to demolish poorly equipped and poorly coordinated PDFs if it can be concentrated on the desired effect.
Socially, the SAC’s grip on metropolitan areas maintains control over the majority of Myanmar’s population and offers the foundations for new elections planned for next year – the only practical exit strategy for a martial that has been trapped in a catastrophic political cul- de- sac since the coup of February 2021.
Diplomatically, in contrast, if some form of electoral process, however transparently constrained and flawed, can be staged, the pseudo-civil administration that emerges may be able to give the military the time it needs to achieve what it is currently at risk losing at an international negotiating table.
Myanmar’s main neighbors, China, India, and Thailand, as well as the ASEAN bloc in general, will likely waste little time in supporting any administration that is dressed in civilian longyis rather than military khakis. Once that engagement gathers traction, it seems likely enough that the West will slowly, if grudgingly, fall into line.
The overarching question for the coming year is whether the SAC’s porcupine strategy anchored on the cities of the populous national heartland can sustain a military stand- off for long enough to ensure the military’s ongoing central role in Myanmar’s governance that it sees as its prerogative.
It would be foolish to make a clear suggestion at the start of the rainy season of 2024. There is undoubtedly nothing wrong with the survival of a shattered military regime that has been abused and is currently facing unprecedented challenges.
Conflict endgames in Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975 and Afghanistan in 1992 and 2021 point to an irrefutable lesson:  , well- equipped militaries enjoying foreign backing but anchored on the defense of shrinking urban enclaves can be overwhelmed by ubiquitous and relentless resistance forces to the point of disintegration and collapse.
Equally, there is nothing predetermined about Myanmar’s ability to form a federal-democratic resistance. The” Spring Revolution” continues to lack the most crucial elements for revolutionary victory, including a charismatic leadership capable of imposing strategic coherence and direction, and an external supporter willing to offer both material and diplomatic support.
Two strategic approaches
In the coming year, Myanmar’s chaotic battlespace will be shaped by two key factors in this fluid environment. Both will be fully visible by the start of 2025 despite the knowns today.
First, and perhaps the more crucial, is the extent to which opposition forces adopt a direct or indirect approach towards the SAC’s porcupine strategy.
A direct strategy would involve PDF forces, either affiliated with the National Unity Government ( NUG) or independent of it, trying to launch attacks on large urban centers and risk being massacred in front of the military’s big guns, which would have potentially disastrous effects on resistance morale, which has remarkably improved since 2021 after three and a half years of conflict.
The Ministry of Defense of the NUG has typically made up for what it lacks in material resources and effective command and control with politically rousing pleas for “victory within a year.” There is no guarantee that the MoD, where real military experience is in short supply, will not continue to press ahead with calls for stirring but unrealistic objectives.
An indirect approach, in contrast, would involve a multi-pronged effort intended to divide and expel already exhausted regime forces. The primary operational focus would not be on urban areas, but rather on the strategic road, rail, and riverine lines of communication that connect them, especially in the coming months.
In short, a war for the roads needs to precede any war for the cities. Resistance forces could prevent the need for a city war by causing internal collapse through stifled supply routes. In the earlier examples from Indochina and Afghanistan, it was not accidental that almost all provincial centers, including Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Kabul, fell to anti-government forces with little or no fighting.
The topography of central Myanmar offers a remarkably favorable setting for such a strategic approach. Along the Ayeyarwaddy and Sittaung river valleys, the Bago Yoma, the Bago Yoma, the mountains of the Arakan Yoma and Chin Hills, the Karen hills, and the main north-south communication lines are hemmed in to the west.
What starts off as a small-unit hit-and-run ambush and harassment turns into a war of attrition along critical communication and supply lines for the delivery of vital fuel and munitions. The process sees an incumbent regime being drawn into exhausting and costly operations to hold open and then re- open major arteries while being forced to abandon minor roads and lose smaller towns for lack of troops to defend them.
Similar a strategy has already been adopted by default over the past dry season along the major highway connecting SAC-held facilities along the Andaman Sea coast along with the escalating sabotage of the Yangon-Mawlamyine and Yangon Mandalay railway lines.  ,  ,
However, larger mobile resistance units would undoubtedly need to ambush roads for days at a time, ambushed in strength and at designated regime response points, and then vanished into nearby hills before repeating the process elsewhere to achieve strategic traction in the upcoming months.
Such tactics would mirror operations launched in early 1944 by British Chindit columns operating behind the lines of the Japanese Imperial Army in the Indaw region of northern Sagaing, which cut its supply routes to lethal effect.
Other components of an indirect approach would be mounting pressure on neighboring townships where the regime lacks the manpower to retake once lost, and destabilizing guerrilla attacks inside major cities where the SAC is already dealing with austere economic strains and the challenge posed by large restless populations.
The ethnic factor
The second variable hinges on a decision that the leaderships of key ethnic resistance organizations, most notably Kachin, Karen, Ta’ang and Rakhine, will need to make soon if they have not already done so.
That choice is merely influenced by historical precedents and how best serves any ethnic community’s long-term goals in relation to who holds the position of power in the Bamar heartland.
Option 1: Increased support for allied PDFs in the form of weapons, advisors, and training that could fuel an indirect strategy and effectively shift the military’s balance in favor of the SAC, likely ushering in an interim administration centered on the NUG.
The alternative would be based on an assessment that ethnic interests are better served by formalizing with the SAC an autonomy already largely won on the battlefield while accepting the risk of leaving an unreformed if weakened military in the national driving seat.
The ethnic armies ‘ wait-and-see or hedging strategy is almost certainly more likely than the success of under-equipped and poorly-directed PDFs in mid-late 2024 to be in favor of the survival of the SAC porcupine.
These variables will play out against the backdrop of the military’s Achilles Heel: its manpower shortfall. Today, a crisis with potentially fatal consequences has become a problem that has been a problem for the past 20 years, with infantry battalions typically numbered around 200 men compared to the 827 that were previously prescribed.  ,  ,  ,
The frantic scramble to accelerate conscription since the introduction of the People’s Military Service Law last February has given the lie to the Wikipedia mythology of a 350, 000- 400, 000 strong Tatmadaw—figures, which to the extent they were ever true, emerged from calculations based on units at full strength and included the military’s notoriously bloated tail of non- combat branches – administrative, commercial, technical and medical.
A figure that combines between 70 000 and 90 000 troops is the centerpiece of the army’s combat-capable strength, according to almost all credible assessments of its strength made by Myanmar and foreign analysts today.
Two factors add to the shortfall in raw numbers. The first is structural: a pattern of penny-packet battalion-sized deployments across 14 regional military units motivated by the essentially political need to confine the entire nation’s population, especially in ethnic regions, rather than protect against foreign aggression.
The second driver, highlighted by recent dry season campaigns in Rakhine and Kachin states, is operational: a stubborn unwillingness to temporarily surrender territory in the interest of regrouping forces for counteroffensives.
The end result has frequently seen smaller tactical operations commands ( TOCs ) fighting until they have either been overrun or surrendered while the hemorrhaging of numbers is getting worse and worse.
Indeed, the military is now at risk that the current battlefield losses may soon outweigh the 5, 000 man-per-month rate of new conscripts ‘ initiation, even if draftees with no prior combat experience have some enthusiasm for the fight.
A resistance strategy targeted squarely over the rest of this year on corridors of communication and supply rather than SAC- held urban porcupines would be well- calculated to act as a further accelerant to the army’s escalating manpower crisis.  ,
However, it’s not guaranteed that such a strategy will be implemented or that Myanmar’s key ethnic armies, whose influence is now crucial, will be willing to support it.