June 13 – Myanmar’s resistance forces relied on a scattered army of drones to make a decisive breakthrough last year in their battle against one of Southeast Asia’s most feared militaries.
But as the conflict drags on, rebels are increasingly finding a familiar weapon in the unfamiliar hands of the country’s military junta: Chinese-made commercial drones modified to carry weapons, according to seven people familiar with the matter. “The fight is changing because drones are being used by both sides,” said a 31-year-old rebel fighter in the country’s southeast who goes by the name Ta Yoke Gyi. He said the junta began using armed unmanned aerial vehicles to attack rebels around the end of the year, and his forces recently shot down a drone whose parts showed it was Chinese-made and modified for combat. Two rebel fighters in other parts of Myanmar also told Reuters they had seen similar skirmishes.
The news agency interviewed four rebel fighters, two analysts and an official from a regional country tracking the conflict who provided first detailed accounts of the junta’s use of hastily-built Chinese-made drones to carry explosives, several of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Ta Yoke Gyi said some of the rebels had been injured by the junta’s drones, adding: “They are getting better at using drones.”
Min Zaw Oo, executive director of the Myanmar Peace and Security Think Tank, said the junta began acquiring thousands of Chinese-made commercial drones earlier this year and was upgrading them to carry domestically produced weapons.
He said he got information about the junta’s drones from military officials and people familiar with weapons manufacturing. A junta spokesman did not return calls seeking comment. The military has not spoken publicly about its recent use of drones. Regime leader Min Aung Hlaing said last year that rebels used drones to drop more than 25,000 bombs on army positions in a major October attack, some of which have since been abandoned.
“China has always adopted a cautious and responsible stance regarding the export of military products and dual-use goods,” foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said in response to a question from Reuters. A spokesman for the shadow unity government, part of the anti-junta resistance, did not respond to a request for comment.
Myanmar’s military ordered about a dozen armed CH-3 drones from China around 2013, according to estimates from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Arms Transfers Database. But the junta has not used such aircraft during its attacks, instead deploying multi-rotor commercial drones, including one designed for agriculture, in recent sorties, resistance forces said.
Four rebel fighters told Reuters they had only seen a few junta drones at a time on the front line in recent months, suggesting the military had not yet deployed all of its newly acquired drones.
Reuters was unable to independently verify why CH-3s are not being used in offensive operations, or why the junta does not appear to be deploying large numbers of Chinese-made commercial drones. More than three years after a dawn coup abruptly ended Myanmar’s tentative democratic experiment, the junta is at its weakest, losing large swaths of territory to an insurgency made up of new armed groups and existing ethnic armies.
While it is difficult to predict how the conflict will play out in the coming months, the rebels appear to have lost their early advantage in using drones to become their main fighting force, said Min Zaw Oo of the Myanmar Institute, a view shared by other analysts and Tha Yoke Gyi.
Instagram Description Commercial drones emerged as a game changer during the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, when the Kiev military used them to quickly build up a large fleet to deploy to the battlefield. In Myanmar, Thayok Gyi didn’t think about weapons until a few years ago. Before the military junta toppled the elected government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, he was a long-distance bus driver.
Angered by the junta’s crackdown on subsequent protests, Ta Yoke Gyi joined thousands of other young people in taking up arms against the military.
He now leads a unit called the Angry Birds Drone Rangers, a branch of the rebel group that began deploying small drones made by China’s DJI for reconnaissance missions shortly after the coup.
DJI did not respond to a request for comment.
The forces then followed instructions from experts on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube to build a large drone that they modified to carry homemade bombs.
“We bought the parts piece by piece and started testing the drone for about four to five months,” Ta York Gyi said.
Three other resistance members described similar methods for building larger, armed drones, some of whose parts are available on local e-commerce platforms, according to a Reuters review of websites.
The rebels use drones to spy on junta positions and then send them in to bomb them, followed by ground attacks, the four sources said.
Min Zaw Oo said that until recently, Myanmar’s military junta relied on artillery and conventional air support to hold strategic positions in the border areas where the bloodiest fighting is taking place.
Additional troops were dispatched as needed, but the junta did not have enough reserves to shore up positions across multiple fronts, he said. Swarms of rebel drones neutralized artillery positions and resistance ground forces cut off a nearby military base, said the analyst, who previously worked on ceasefire negotiations between the military and ethnic minority forces.
The two analysts said the most notable demonstration of rebel drone warfare came during Operation 1027, a major offensive led by a coalition of three ethnic armies in October last year.
Morgan Michaels, a Myanmar expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said fighters from the Three Brotherhoods rebel group “flew one drone after another and dropped explosives on these bases.”
But in the months that followed, resistance groups began coming under attack by junta drones.
“I think Operation 1027 and the way drones were used against the regime was definitely a wake-up call,” said Michaels, who follows the battlefield closely. “Now it appears they’re significantly expanding their use of drones in an offensive capacity.”
Two rebel fighters told Reuters they had shot down a drone believed to be designed to dust crops. One fighter based in eastern Myanmar said the one his forces shot down had the word “Boying” written on it in English.
Boying, a China-based company that makes flight control devices primarily for agricultural drones, declined to comment.
Min Zaw Oo said the demoralized junta’s military, which relies on conscription to replenish its shrinking front-line forces, welcomed the expansion of the drone attack fleet.
He said the military would likely remain on the defensive as it takes time to retrain and rearm, “but at the same time, they will be using drones to disrupt rebel positions.”
This article has been generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
