For centuries, the small northern Myanmar city of Bhamo has owed its prosperity to its importance as a ferry terminus and commercial hub on a wide bend on the upper Ayeyarwady River close to the border with neighboring China.
In recent months, that strategic location in Kachin state has required its slow destruction in a test of will and resources that bodes ill for the future of Myanmar – but which may push resistance forces opposed to the State Administration Council (SAC) military regime to a radical rethink of their approach to the war.
In early June, the battle for the city pitting an embattled SAC garrison against forces of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) determined to eject the military from their state reached a bitter six-month mark.
While the KIA has succeeded in capturing outlying battalion bases and reducing the military, or Tatmadaw, to an enclave in the compound of the 21st Military Operations Command, a garrison of up to 1,000 troops and camp followers continues a stubborn defense that has already cost hundreds of dead on both sides in almost medieval siege warfare.
The battle of Bhamo, which could well drag on through the current monsoon season, raises an overarching and unpalatable question about the trajectory of the writ-large war: Is this a conflict in which even the most experienced and best-organized resistance forces countrywide prove simply incapable of capturing urban areas?
That the siege has bogged down for over six months stems from several key factors, mostly foreshadowed by events last year in distant Rakhine state on Myanmar’s western seaboard.
In 2024, battles between isolated SAC garrisons and the local Arakan Army (AA), notably around Thandwe, Maungdaw and the western Regional Military Command at Ann, were all fought out for months before the insurgents finally wrested control.
This year, the AA evidently hopes to repeat those costly victories with another meat-grinder assault currently aimed at seizing economically and financially crucial facilities at the Rakhine port of Kyaukphyu, where a SAC garrison still controls the Bay of Bengal terminus of oil and natural gas pipelines to China.
With the stakes now immeasurably higher, whether it succeeds or finds itself bogged down in a coastal version of Bhamo, in which the Tatmadaw can count on resupply and fire support from the sea, remains to be seen.
Either way, an undeniable driver behind the protracted nature of Myanmar’s siege warfare is a reality that much of the anti-SAC media and commentariat has preferred to downplay or altogether ignore: the fact that regime forces are typically not looking to defect or surrender at an early opportunity.
In many, perhaps most, engagements, they are in fact willing to undergo severe privations before succumbing to the inevitable, often at the cost of their lives.
According to reports from the AA itself, the weeks-long siege of the Rakhine naval base of Maung Shwe Lay ended last September only after the death in action of around 400 army and naval troops, hardly an indication of crumbling morale.
Two interlinked characteristics of the Myanmar military arguably underpin that resilience: committed junior officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who hold small combat units together, and rigid discipline among other ranks instilled during training.
How far and how fast the induction of tens of thousands of newly drafted and only partially trained conscripts will act to erode those strengths is worth watching, but to date, no major mass surrenders due to conscription have been reported – if for no other reason than that fresh conscripts are being absorbed into existing battalions rather than forming new ones.
A second factor behind protracted sieges, which by contrast has been exhaustively reported, is the role of the Myanmar Air Force (MAF) in providing close air support.
Even as it has been bombing schools, clinics and monasteries, the MAF has demonstrated a striking capacity to sustain multiple daily sorties over threatened military positions, targeting frontline resistance forces or preempting their concentration.
That high operational tempo reflects short flying and turnaround times from a range of major bases and forward airfields across the country. As importantly, it is also a testament to both the steady delivery of spare parts and fuel and round-the-clock ground maintenance, both of which appear to have improved over four years of war.
As a result, the MAF has not only mounted strikes with a range of relatively new aircraft – notably its Russian Yak-130 light attack jets and Chinese FTC-2000G multi-role fighters – but has also been able to keep airborne museum exhibits from the 1980s, including a squadron of F-7 interceptors, Chinese copies of the vintage Soviet Mig-21.
On June 10, an F-7 was shot down over a battlefield in Sagaing, reportedly by heavy machinegun fire. But over Bhamo as elsewhere, the war has been characterized by an implacable imbalance between insurgent forces dependent at best on small arms for air defense and MAF assets able to strike with virtual impunity.
In over four years of conflict and thousands of sorties flown since the SAC ousted the civilian government in February 2021, insurgent ground fire has resulted in only 13 confirmed MAF losses: four Chinese-built fixed-wing jets and nine helicopters.
Finally, a well-resourced and foreign-advised Drone Force Directorate, set up last year, has overseen a dramatic proliferation of drones supplementing the impact of manned aircraft in extending stand-offs around urban areas. An accelerated process has resulted in the deployment of a range of Chinese and Russian platforms for reconnaissance, target-locating and direct attack.
Tactically responsive attack drones, launched not from distant airbases but by troops close behind the front line, now also include cheap indigenously produced delta-wing kamikaze platforms, essentially mini-copies of a Chinese model itself based on the Iranian Shahed-136 of Ukraine war fame, as well as first-person view (FPV) quad- and hexacopter suicide drones.
Since early February, the battle for Bhamo has also seen the first use of forward-looking infrared (FLIR) cameras providing thermal imaging to tactical reconnaissance and attack drones, enabling army defenders to target KIA troops moving up on positions around buildings at night.
Now cut off by both land and river and with the city’s airport in KIA hands since late January, Bhamo’s battered garrison remains wholly dependent for resupply on air drops either from fixed-wing Y-12 or larger four-engine Y-8s or Mi-17 helicopters.
The downing of two helicopters on May 20 by KIA troops using FPV drones – a notable first for anti-SAC forces countrywide – indicates that resupply, at least by rotary aircraft, is becoming riskier.
Whether that will be sufficient to push the garrison to surrender or collapse is unclear, but it seems unlikely. What is obvious, however, is that the failure to take a relatively small city after six months and hundreds of casualties is no blueprint for future operations.
Whether the KIA will be inclined to repeat the exercise around the state capital of Myitkyina, 130 kilometers to the north and still in SAC hands, is doubtful after the Bhamo experience.
Myanmar military on the move
The Bhamo battle comes against the backdrop of a war in which the Myanmar military has been particularly active in recent months.
Having largely recovered from the trauma of its losses in late 2023 and early 2024, the army appears to be improving its tactical organization on key fronts, particularly the coordination between infantry, artillery and drones.
Perennially overstretched, the infantry-centric Tatmadaw remains organizationally incapable of serious combined-arms offensives, but it has begun channeling resources – additional manpower, air power and munitions – in two more immediately pressing directions.
The first is defensive: fighting tooth and nail to maintain its grip on township centers across the national heartland and beyond. This dynamic has played out even in the most difficult circumstances, such as the combined PDF offensive in Mandalay region in May.
As events in Ngazun, Natogyi and Taungtha made clear, township centers may be invaded and police stations overrun, but regime reinforcements, heliborne or by land, invariably reassert control within days.
At the same time, the army is also attempting to launch limited counteroffensives involving task forces of between 300 and 500 troops on economically crucial fronts. Around Hpakant, 175 kilometers northwest of Bhamo in Kachin state, recent weeks have seen the army launch a twin-pronged campaign aimed at breaking a KIA siege of the economically vital jade mining center.
In the southwest corner of Shan state, SAC troops threaten to push ethnic Karenni resistance forces out of the town of Mobye, thereby opening the road to the Karenni state capital of Loikaw. Success there would likely enable the reinforcement of the besieged townships of Bawlakhe and Hpasaung, where surrounded SAC garrisons are still holding out in the center and south of the eastern state.
No less important advances have taken place in Naungcho (Nawnghkio) township east of Mandalay in the northwestern corner of Shan state. In a slow-grind campaign that has dragged on since early this year, better-organized and resupplied regime forces have pushed the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) out of villages and off heights around Taung Hkam in the south of the township and north towards the strategically vital township center.
The recapture of Naungcho town, located on the main highway between Mandalay and the Chinese border, is key to a vital long-term SAC plan assisted by China to reopen the entire highway to trade and the revenue that flows from it.
Under punishing Chinese economic-political pressure, the TNLA’s Kokang Chinese allies of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) have already been coerced into the staggering humiliation of turning Lashio, captured in July last year, back to SAC control. Since then, the TNLA has also faced mounting Chinese pressure to surrender its gains.
War of the roads
Viewed in aggregate, these dynamics confront anti-SAC resistance forces with a yawning dilemma on which the outcome of the war will ultimately hinge: how to translate tactical successes that are occurring daily in many regions of the country into strategic gains when the prospect of taking even relatively small towns, let alone cities, remains out of reach.
There are arguably only two answers to that question, one operational, the other more broadly political. Unsurprisingly, they are linked.
In the first instance, it is obvious that strategy going forward should focus not on laying siege to cities or towns but on the far more vulnerable lines of transport and communication that both connect and sustain them.
As they ratchet up economic and political pressure on the regime, resistance operations aimed at interdicting and gradually controlling roads and rail lines can be tactically flexible, but cumulatively act to force the Tatmadaw into constant, exhausting road-opening and bridge-rebuilding forays in which convoys are decimated and eventually turned back.
Nor should a primary focus on lines of communication preclude ongoing harassment around and inside urban areas as part of an incremental process that over months is likely to see outlying townships finally abandoned by their garrisons or surrendered while weakening the SAC from within.
There are scattered but growing indications that the current dilemma is, by default, already prompting this response along secondary and some primary roads.
A growing (albeit often reactive) willingness to contest and deny the regime access to key roads has been demonstrated in a string of recent operations, namely by Karen forces along the Asia Highway west of Kawkareik, by the KIA between Hpakant and Kamaing, and by People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) along the Pakokku-Pauk road in Magwe region.
But turning temporary local successes into sustained strategic effects requires extending a war of the roads towards national highways and primary north-south lines of communication. And that, in turn, requires a political dimension.
In the context of the current war, ethnic, political and geographical differences clearly preclude any possibility of a unity of command among Myanmar’s leading resistance actors.
On the ethnic side, the group would include the KIA, TNLA, Karen National Union (KNU), and, not least, the immensely influential Arakan Army, which in addition to its current Kyaukphyu campaign now threatens the SAC in strategically critical areas of the lower Ayeyarwady Valley.
The ethnic Bamar regions of central Myanmar have given rise to several dominant groups, of which PDFs directly controlled by the National Unity Government (NUG) are only one component.
While anything even approaching unity of command among these disparate interests is unrealistic, reaching a lowest-common-denominator agreement on a loosely coordinated strategy targeting key lines of national communication over the rest of 2025 and into next year should not be.
What is now unambiguously clear is that as Myanmar’s military digs in, reorganizes and turns slowly to offensive operations bolstered by foreign resources and advice from China and Russia, the bitter lesson of Bhamo demands an alternative way forward.
