In Myanmar’s war-torn borderlands, a discernible pattern has emerged. From Myitkyina and Bhamo in northern Kachin state to Lashio in northeastern Shan and Sittwe on the Bay of Bengal, the Myanmar Army is retreating into urban bastions fortified by air power, artillery, and ample ammunition supplies. This strategic shift comes after months of defeats at the hands of ethnic minority insurgent armies. The embattled State Administration Council (SAC) junta is increasingly adopting a “porcupine strategy,” consolidating its forces behind an array of formidable defenses.

The junta’s porcupine strategy, while less a deliberate plan and more a reaction to the aggressive advances of resistance forces, offers several advantages. Militarily, it draws opposition forces from their mountainous strongholds to the plains and rice paddies around large cities, where the army’s superior firepower can be most effective. Politically, it maintains control over urban populations and sets the stage for potential elections, offering a possible exit strategy from the current political impasse. Diplomatically, even flawed elections might garner enough international recognition to prolong the military’s grip on power.

The SAC’s military strategy invites opposition forces to engage in the open plains, where the army’s artillery, armor, and air power can inflict devastating damage. This approach is aimed at decimating the less equipped and loosely coordinated People’s Defense Forces (PDFs). By concentrating its firepower around urban centers, the military hopes to leverage its technological superiority against the insurgents.

Politically, the SAC’s control of urban areas is crucial. It allows the junta to maintain its grip on the majority of Myanmar’s population and lay the groundwork for planned elections. These elections, though likely flawed, could provide a semblance of legitimacy and offer a path out of the current political deadlock. For the military, retaining its central role in governance is a non-negotiable objective.

Diplomatic Maneuvering

Diplomatically, the SAC hopes that any form of electoral process, no matter how constrained, will be sufficient to secure international recognition. Key neighbors like China, India, and Thailand, along with the ASEAN bloc, are likely to endorse the polls and engage with a civilian-adorned administration. Over time, even Western nations might reluctantly follow suit, ensuring the military remains a central power broker.

The federal-democratic resistance, despite its widespread popular support, faces significant challenges. The absence of a unified political party, charismatic leadership, and an external backer poses substantial obstacles. Two strategic approaches could shape the resistance’s efforts in the coming year: direct attacks on urban centers or an indirect strategy focusing on lines of communication.

A direct approach involves PDFs attacking large urban centers, risking high casualties and potentially demoralizing the resistance. The National Unity Government (NUG) has often compensated for material shortages with rousing calls for “victory within a year,” but this approach risks devastating losses.

An indirect approach, conversely, would target the regime’s supply lines and communication routes, avoiding direct confrontations with the military’s superior firepower. This strategy could exhaust and deplete regime forces by severing crucial supply routes and forcing the military into costly and unsustainable operations.

Ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) such as the Kachin, Karen, Ta’ang, and Rakhine groups play a critical role. Their decision to support PDFs or negotiate with the SAC could determine the conflict’s outcome. Increased support for PDFs could tip the balance against the SAC, while negotiating autonomy might leave the military in control but weakened.

The Overarching Question

The overarching question for the coming year is whether the SAC’s porcupine strategy, anchored in the cities of the populous national heartland, can sustain a military standoff long enough to ensure the military’s ongoing central role in Myanmar’s governance, a role it sees as its prerogative.

As the rainy season of 2024 begins, it would be foolhardy to suggest a clear answer. There is certainly nothing inevitable about the survival of a beleaguered military regime overstretched and exhausted by unprecedented challenges that continue to mount.

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 preordained about the success of Myanmar’s federal-democratic resistance. Despite enjoying wide popular support, the “Spring Revolution” continues to lack the most important prerequisites for revolutionary victory: a vanguard political party capable of imposing strategic coherence and direction, charismatic leadership able to inspire and rally, and an external backer willing to provide material and diplomatic support.

Against this fluid backdrop, two key variables will be critical in shaping Myanmar’s chaotic battlespace over the coming year. Unknowns today, both will be on full display by the beginning of 2025.

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 approach would involve PDF forces, either affiliated with the National Unity Government (NUG) or independent of it, attempting to launch attacks on large urban centers. This could risk being slaughtered in front of the military’s big guns, potentially with disastrous implications for resistance morale that has remarkably weathered three and a half years of conflict since 2021.

The NUG’s Ministry of Defense’s tendency to date has typically been to compensate for what it lacks in material resources and effective command and control with politically rousing calls 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.

By contrast, an indirect approach would involve a multi-pronged effort aimed at dividing and exhausting already depleted regime forces. Requiring only minimal coordination, the primary operational focus would not be around urban areas but rather—especially in the coming months—on the strategic road, rail, and riverine lines of communication that connect them.

In short, a war for the roads needs to precede any war for the cities. By triggering internal collapse through blocked supply routes, resistance forces could avoid the need for a war for the cities. It was not by chance that in the examples from Indochina and Afghanistan noted above, all three capitals of Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Kabul, and most provincial centers, 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. Main north-south lines of communication along the Ayeyarwaddy and Sittaung river valleys are hemmed in to the west by mountains of the Arakan Yoma and Chin Hills, to the east by the Karen hills, and along the central spine of the country by the Bago Yoma.

What begins with small-unit hit-and-run ambush and harassment escalates into a war of attrition along lines of communication and supply lines critical for the delivery of crucial 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.

To a degree, such a strategy has already emerged by default over the past dry season along the major highway connecting SAC-held centers in the southern Tanintharyi panhandle along the Andaman Sea coast and with escalating sabotage of the Yangon-Mawlamyine and Yangon-Mandalay railway lines.

But achieving strategic traction in the coming months would undoubtedly require larger mobile resistance units severing roads for days at a stretch; ambushing in strength and at points of their own choosing regime response units; and then disappearing into nearby hills before repeating the process elsewhere.

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 elements of an indirect approach would include mounting pressure on outlying townships in which the regime lacks the manpower to retake once lost, and destabilizing guerrilla attacks inside major cities where the SAC is already facing daunting economic strains and, before long, the challenge posed by large restless populations.

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. Historic in its ramifications, that decision hinges simply on what approach better serves the long-term interests of any ethnic community in relation to who holds power in the country’s Bamar heartland.

One option would involve increased support for allied PDFs in the shape of munitions, advisors, and training that could fuel an indirect strategy and decisively tip the military balance against 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.

Military’s Manpower Crisis

The Myanmar military faces a severe manpower crisis. Battalions are often understrength, and recent conscription efforts have not resolved the shortfall. The military’s persistent deployment patterns and unwillingness to regroup and counterattack further exacerbate the issue. Targeting supply lines could intensify the military’s manpower challenges, accelerating its decline.

Myanmar’s conflict remains highly fluid, with the SAC’s porcupine strategy and the resistance’s response shaping the future. Whether the resistance adopts a direct or indirect approach, and the extent of ethnic armed organizations’ support, will be crucial. As the conflict unfolds, Myanmar’s path to peace and stability remains uncertain, with significant implications for its people and the region.

Myanmar, focusing on the SAC’s defensive strategy and the resistance’s potential responses. The outcome of this struggle will significantly impact Myanmar’s future, highlighting the importance of strategic decisions by both the junta and the resistance forces.

The reality is almost certainly that either a wait-and-see or a hedging approach on the part of the ethnic armies would objectively be more likely to favor the survival of the SAC porcupine than the success of under-equipped and ill-directed PDFs.

These variables will play out against the backdrop of the military’s Achilles heel: its manpower shortfall. What has been a persistent problem over the past two decades with infantry battalions typically numbering around 200 men rather than the prescribed 827 is today a crisis with potentially terminal implications.

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.

Almost all credible assessments of the army’s combat-capable strength made by Myanmar and foreign analysts coalesce around a figure somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 troops.

The shortfall in raw numbers is exacerbated by two factors. The first is structural: a pattern of penny-packet battalion-size deployments across 14 regional military commands driven by the essentially political need to garrison the population of the entire country, not least in ethnic regions, rather than defend 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 result, again and again, has seen isolated battalions or larger tactical operations commands (TOCs) fighting until they have either been overrun or surrender while the hemorrhaging of numbers continues apace.

Indeed, the military now faces the risk that current battlefield losses may soon be outpacing the advertised 5,000 man-per-month rate of induction of new conscripts—even assuming draftees with no 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.

Whether such a strategy will be adopted, however, or whether Myanmar’s key ethnic armies, whose role on the national stage is now decisive, will be willing to support it is anything but guaranteed. The coming months will be crucial in determining the future of Myanmar’s resistance and the potential survival of the SAC junta.