Effectively earlier than the Myanmar Air Pressure (MAF) started preparations to escalate a national onslaught on the federal-democratic opposition within the coming months, resistance politicians, commanders, combatants and peculiar villagers alike had been grappling with a looming concern: a determined lack of air protection.
There was no scarcity of efforts to no less than mitigate the dilemma by way of anguished appeals to the worldwide neighborhood and quixotic – and in some instances painfully costly – forays into the treacherous back-alleys of the worldwide arms black market.
Maybe predictably each have centered on buying the silver bullet on each guerrilla military’s want record: man-portable air protection techniques, or MANPADS.
However by early 2023 nearly all actors within the battle and observers past have acknowledged the truth that shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles won’t be coming to the rescue of Myanmar’s opposition forces within the foreseeable future.
In sharp distinction to Afghanistan of the Nineteen Eighties or Syria of the 2010s, in Myanmar of the 2020s no neighboring state has any curiosity in facilitating the supply into the nation of MANPADS – or another vital weaponry – even assuming an exterior energy or dependable black market vendor had been keen to produce them.
Neighbors Thailand, India, China, Bangladesh and Laos have all adopted a coverage that’s predicated on the evaluation that rising however recognized ranges of instability in Myanmar are preferable to the nice unknown: the collapse of the army’s State Administration Council (SAC) regime {that a} sustainable arms pipeline to opposition forces would most likely set off.
On the identical time, it is usually obvious that the United Wa State Army (UWSA), the one ethnic armed faction inside Myanmar that does possess vital numbers of MANPADS – each third-generation Chinese language FN-6 missiles and obsolescent second-generation HN-5s – shouldn’t be within the enterprise of promoting them.
Whereas the Wa have been apparently eager to produce their northern rebel allies with a formidable number of army {hardware} produced each in China and regionally in their very own territory, the UWSA’s interlocutors from China’s Folks’s Liberation Army (PLA) have nearly definitely imposed a tough veto on MANPADS proliferation.
And at this stage within the battle, there may be little motive to consider that coverage will change or that the Wa will search to bypass it to any vital diploma.
Exhausting options
Absent MANPADS, there are arguably two different means or a mixture of them that the anti-SAC resistance may make use of to counter the risk from the air, though neither provides a silver bullet or is prone to bear fruit within the coming yr.
The primary is a gradual proliferation of heavy machine weapons (HMGs) and particularly Chinese language-manufactured Sort-77 12.7 mm weapons already scattered throughout the nation and deployed by a number of main combatants, notably the tripartite Brotherhood Alliance that features the Ta’ang Nationwide Liberation Army (TNLA) and the Myanmar Nationalities Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in Shan State and the Arakan Army (AA) on the western Rakhine seaboard.
Unconfirmed studies have recommended that the power of the TNLA to convey Chinese language HMGs to the combat in Shan State’s Namhsan township in December was one issue behind the stinging defeat meted out to the army’s insertion of heliborne troops.
Arguing in favor of the Sort-77 HMG is its capability to behave as a big deterrent to low-flying helicopters and to a lesser extent low flying fixed-wing plane.
Between the start of the Afghanistan battle in 1979 and 1986, when the introduction of US-supplied Stinger shoulder-launched missiles provided by way of Pakistan dramatically altered the air struggle calculus, anti-communist resistance forces relied closely and with some success on 12.7mm HMGs.
The weapon’s limitations are three-fold. First, even correct machine-gun fireplace doesn’t carry the speedy kinetic or wider psychological affect of a missile strike.
Second, is the burden issue. Fired from a tripod or mounted on a car, the Sort-77 HMG shouldn’t be “man-portable.” Weighing in at 56 kilograms together with tripod, (as in opposition to 16 kilograms for a Chinese language FN-6 MANPADS), the gun requires transport by mule, horse or off-road car.
Its tactical utility is thus restricted both to defending semi-permanent bases the place ideally two or extra weapons can present interlocking fields of fireplace, or to supporting deliberate assaults on enemy positions certain to impress the intervention of air assist.
Third, there may be nothing to recommend that both the UWSA or the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which have each developed indigenous small arms manufacturing capabilities, can prove copies of the Sort-77.
Which means restricted numbers of the HMG produced in China and channeled by way of the Wa usually tend to be jealously guarded by ethnic resistance organizations (EROs) than offered extra broadly to anti-coup Folks’s Protection Forces (PDFs).
Preventing fireplace with fireplace
Assaults on airbases geared toward stopping plane from taking off within the first place are one other, surer response to air energy. And it’s no coincidence that in Myanmar efforts to destroy plane on the bottom have elevated in frequency because the air struggle has escalated.
For the reason that coup of February 2021, ethnic and PDF forces have launched assaults on bases at Nampong, Meiktila, Magwe, Toungoo, and, most lately, Mingaladon.
These assaults have nearly invariably relied on 107mm surface-to-surface rockets, a notoriously inaccurate stand-off projectile with a variety of as much as 8 kilometers. Its utility primarily requires firing in salvos from a wheeled 12-barrel launcher, however in Myanmar, the rocket has invariably been fired in twos or threes with out launchers and so far has failed to wreck not to mention destroy plane.
Given the talents that PDFs throughout the nation have developed in the usage of armed drones, assaults on airbases could be anticipated to depend on this tactic. However the notable absence of studies of such operations results in just one conclusion: the systematic set up of drone-jamming tools bought in 2022 from China to defend strategically important amenities has precluded their use.
The far more practical different to stand-off rocket or drone assaults includes attackers infiltrating an air base with mild weapons and demolition prices and destroying parked plane from close-up – a tactic developed to dramatic impact within the 2000s by Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers and later copied by jihadist guerrillas in Pakistan.
In July 2001, 14 Tiger commandos infiltrated the Sri Lankan Air Pressure’s fundamental base at Katunayake north of the capital Colombo destroying eight army plane and damaging others earlier than occurring to wreak havoc within the adjoining Bandaranaike Worldwide Airport the place they destroyed three civilian Airbus jets and broken two others.
An analogous assault involving 21 Tiger commandos struck the army airbase at Anuradhapura in October 2007, destroying no less than eight plane and damaging 10 others.
Each raids, nonetheless, had been deliberate and executed as suicide operations that ended with the loss of life of just about all of the Black Tiger assault groups. Within the wholly completely different cultural context of Myanmar, there may be nothing to recommend that PDF fighters will probably be volunteering for one-way assault missions within the foreseeable future.
Focusing on the gas that constitutes the lifeblood of the air struggle and must be transported recurrently to bases throughout the nation may provide a extra sensible different to suicide assaults.
However even this apparently easy expedient requires a community of dependable intelligence sources working in assist of succesful assault models outfitted with the rocket-propelled grenades and machine weapons wanted to destroy gas vans. That advanced functionality is sort of definitely past the attain of resistance forces within the coming months.
Lastly, the proposition {that a} comparable consequence might be achieved by imposing sanctions on aviation gas is hardly severe. As one of many world’s largest exporters of oil, Russia won’t be standing idle because the air pressure of its solely actual ally in Southeast Asia is slowly grounded by Western sanctions.
Tactical adaptation
These daunting tactical constraints increase an overarching strategic query: is regime airpower sufficiently potent and ubiquitous to disclaim any ahead motion by Myanmar’s opposition forces, repelling assaults on military strongpoints and safeguarding indefinitely regime management of city areas whereas Naypyidaw waits for the army and political tide of resistance to slowly ebb?
The reply must be a guarded “not essentially.” The historical past of recent insurgencies signifies that whereas airpower can show lethally efficient and precise a horrible toll on civilians, it might probably by no means be omnipresent and its affect on broadly scattered guerrilla forces isn’t decisive militarily. Finally, land wars are received and misplaced by floor forces.
However equally clear is that for Myanmar’s opposition forces to have any prospect of success, they might want to adapt ways for an offensive section of the struggle aimed in the interim on the strategic targets of destroying enemy forces and seizing weaponry – not at untimely and futile makes an attempt to grab and maintain territory that the regime seeks to contest.
The destruction of enemy forces and seize of their weapons goal Naypyidaw’s biggest army vulnerability – undermanned and overstretched models – whereas progressively compensating for the resistance’s lack of exterior assist.
At the obvious degree, adapting ways to the truth of airpower requires systematically exploiting darkness, camouflage and mobility – primary expedients of survival already been realized in lots of elements of the nation, not least by civilians.
As vital militarily, nonetheless, is the necessity to operationalize probably the most primary tactical precept of profitable guerrilla warfare in opposition to an entrenched regime backed by airpower: focus of decisively superior numbers and firepower to quickly overrun weaker positions, adopted by equally fast withdrawal and dispersal.
On this basic formulation, the phrases “decisively superior” are key and normally suggest a 3:1 ratio of attackers to defenders. If the precept is ignored extra typically than noticed in Myanmar, there’s a good motive and a elementary problem.
Tactical focus and dispersal of resistance forces to destroy regime floor forces whereas on the identical time mitigating the affect of air energy can solely occur within the context of some unity of command on the greater operational degree.
Clear to even an informal observer of Myanmar is that on the nationwide degree unity of army command over resistance forces is neither doable nor fascinating. The boundaries of geography, tradition and group dividing completely different EROs are merely insurmountable.
They’re additional difficult by political strains between EROs and the largely ethnic Bamar-dominated Nationwide Unity Authorities (NUG) and the pressing want for a blueprint for far-reaching federal autonomy that may outbid provides of future reform emanating from Naypyidaw and safe dedicated buy-in from key ethnic minority communities.
C3C or to not be?
Below these circumstances, one of the best that may be anticipated on the nationwide degree is a level of army liaison based mostly on a construction that the NUG has already established – the Central Command and Coordination Committee, the so-called “C3C.” This platform provides no less than the potential of free coordination of separate campaigns in numerous elements of the nation throughout future phases of the struggle.
Extra instantly, the place efficient integration of command shouldn’t be solely doable however important is on the operational degree inside particular areas of the nation’s borderlands.
Because of each rugged terrain and the resilience of the Kachin, Chin, Karen and Karenni EROs based mostly there, these areas have already emerged as army facilities of gravity and, not by coincidence, overlap with the three “Navy Division Instructions” (MDC) introduced in 2021 by the NUG.
On paper no less than, in these zones – MDC 1 protecting Kachin and Chin states, MDC 2 protecting Karen, and MDC 3 encompassing Karenni – comparatively well-equipped and skilled EROs exert operational command over new PDFs affiliated with the NUG’s Ministry of Protection which will be deployed for joint operations beneath the general course of an ERO commander.
In a best-case situation, this command construction will be step by step prolonged from the nationwide periphery to soak up PDFs within the extra central ethnic Bamar heartland the place army cohesion amongst a shifting kaleidoscope of separate resistance teams is being strongly examined.
Even on the regional degree, imposing some unity of command over resistance forces won’t be simple; some skeptical analysts argue that it is going to be not possible. It would definitely have to take care of the truth of army fragmentation not solely between EROs and PDFs which have emerged since 2021 however inside EROs themselves.
For many years Karen, Kachin and different EROs have divided their forces throughout organizationally separate brigade areas configured for native protection utilizing guerrilla ways relatively than offensive warfare that by definition calls for mobility. Some EROs, most notably the Karen Nationwide Liberation Army (KNLA), have been stricken by infighting and breakaway factions.
Lastly, problems with logistics and sources loom giant. Molding numerous armed models, many with their very own native agendas, into army forces keen to be deployed in sustained offensive operations hinges crucially on the power of regional instructions to entry and provide sources, together with munitions, rice and, not least, money.
Within the coming months of the dry season, the success or failure of resistance commanders to acknowledge and reply to those challenges beneath the strain of unremitting bombardment from the air will largely form the way forward for the struggle.
