P a c N e t 3 0 P A C I F I C F OR U M · H ON OLU LU , H I M a y 2, 20 24

MYANMAR’S WIDENING WAR - The scale of the army’s recent battlefield losses and HEADING FOR THE JUNTA’S its impact on morale offers some ground for hope that HEARTLAND the coming phase of the war might, if nasty and brutish, at least be short and that a “strategic offensive” BY ANTHONY DAVIS announced by the opposition National Unity Anthony Davis is an Asian security analyst who has Government (NU. [...] Even before the end of a dry season that has Launched by the tripartite Brotherhood Alliance of dramatically upended the military balance in ethnic Palaung, Kokang Chinese, and Rakhine Myanmar, the broad and profoundly sobering insurgent armies, the “Operation 1027” that first contours of conflict over the remainder of 2024 and opened on Oct. [...] prepared and still ongoing campaign waged from mid- But the war in the coming rainy season and beyond November by the Brotherhood’s numerically largest will almost certainly be waged at increasing intensity force, the Arakan Army (AA), which in a blistering in the country’s populous ethnic Bamar heartland and flurry of assaults has seized most of the center and will be a very different fight. [...] Short of a political implosion of the embattled regime in Naypyidaw—a conceivable but still unlikely And, in early March, it was the turn of the Kachin scenario—the already discernable shift of major Independence Army (KIA) to launch a strategic hostilities toward the center of national power offensive, which in less than two weeks relieved promises a far less organized and more brutally pressure. [...] Unfolding in a matter of weeks, the impact of this debacle on an army already facing a crisis of overstretched manpower has no doubt shaken confidence at command levels to the core and almost certainly triggered the early February decision to activate a national conscription law with a call-up process beginning in April.