Myanmar's military junta has lost substantial territory, seen thousands of its soldiers surrender, and resorted to forced conscription — a cascade of setbacks that has reshaped the trajectory of a civil war now entering its sixth year since the February 2021 coup.

The inflection point came in late October 2023, when three well-armed ethnic armed organizations launched a coordinated surprise offensive in northeastern Myanmar, shattering what had been a grinding strategic stalemate. Known as Operation 1027, the joint assault by the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta'ang National Liberation Army, and the Arakan Army punctured the regime's claim to territorial control across a region it had held for decades. AP News reported in late 2024 that rebel forces were making tangible progress toward ousting the junta outright.

The Territorial Collapse

By the end of 2023 and throughout 2024, the Tatmadaw — Myanmar's formal military — shed significant territory across multiple fronts. The northeast was the most visible fracture. In August 2024, the junta lost communications with commanders at its army headquarters in Lashio, a strategically critical garrison town in Shan State that serves as the operational hub for the military's Northern Command, AP News reported. The loss of that communications link was a stark operational signal: centralized command and control, the connective tissue of any conventional military force, was degrading in real time.

The human dimension of the collapse is equally striking. By February 2024, thousands of junta soldiers had surrendered without a fight — among them six Tatmadaw generals, a cohort whose capitulation without resistance is without obvious precedent in the post-independence history of Myanmar's armed forces.

The resistance coalition drawing these victories is not a monolithic insurgency. It is a patchwork of the People's Defence Force (the armed wing of the civilian National Unity Government), long-established ethnic resistance organizations, and powerful ethnic minority militias with their own command structures, territorial interests, and foreign connections. AP News noted in May 2024 that ethnic minority armed groups form a core pillar of the anti-junta coalition's combat power — a structural feature that complicates both the junta's counteroffensive calculus and any eventual political settlement.

The Junta's Response

Facing manpower shortages that mass surrenders only deepened, the regime activated mandatory military service in February 2024 — the first time conscription has been enforced in Myanmar's modern history. The move underscored how thin the Tatmadaw's volunteer recruitment had become under the pressures of a multi-front war.

On the battlefield, the junta has compensated for ground-force degradation with tactics drawn partly from attritional doctrine and partly from available technology. Reuters reported in December 2025 that junta forces are deploying human-wave attacks alongside drone operations — a pairing that reflects both the expendability of conscript infantry and the regime's access to commercially available unmanned systems. Human-wave tactics generate casualties at scale; drones extend reach without risking pilots. It is a combination that speaks to a force trading precision for mass.

Five years in, the conflict has become one of the most complex civil wars in Asia — multiple overlapping fronts, competing armed factions with divergent political objectives, and an international dimension shaped by China's border interests, Western sanctions, and ASEAN's studied non-intervention.

The broader strategic picture for the junta is unfavorable in ways that go beyond battlefield maps. Conscription can address a headcount deficit, but it does not restore unit cohesion, officer credibility, or the territorial depth needed to hold a dispersed perimeter against motivated adversaries fighting on home terrain. Generals who surrender without contact — six of them — are a morale signal as much as a military one.

What the resistance coalition does with its momentum is the open question. Ethnic armed organizations have historically pursued autonomy within a federal Myanmar, not regime change from Naypyidaw. The National Unity Government wants the latter. Bridging that gap while sustaining military pressure is a political challenge the opposition has yet to resolve — and the junta, for its part, is banking on that tension as its most durable remaining asset.