Myanmar is waging the world’s second most intense drone war

Myanmar is currently waging the second-most intense drone war in the world, after the one involving Russia and Ukraine. This is according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project, as well as a study by the London School of Economics (LSE).

The drones that gave the opposition an advantage during the early years of the civil war (2021-present) are now among the weapons most favored by the ruling military junta. In 2023, for instance, the military authority — officially known as the Tatmadaw — was responsible for only 5% of the drone attacks recorded in the country, according to ACLED data analyzed by EL PAÍS. However, since June 2025, that proportion has risen to 71%.

These attacks are increasingly targeting civilians. In the first three weeks of September, at least 12 civilians — six of them children — were killed in five suicide drone strikes and three air strikes in the east of the country, according to Burma News International (BNI), a network of independent Burmese media outlets.

The resistance is responding with the same weapon, targeting the most valuable assets in the enemy’s arsenal. On September 10, drones attacked the Tada-U air base, near the airport in Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city with over 1.2 million inhabitants. The Myanmar Air Force has its fleet of Russian-made Yak-130 combat aircraft there, with each jet costing around $15 million. Days earlier, the Kachin guerrillas — the Kachin people being one of the ethnic minorities in the north — had sunk almost half the boats in a convoy traveling up the Irrawaddy River. They were carrying supplies for a besieged city. A bulletin affiliated with the resistance — which released images of the attack — claims that drones hit 14 boats in a single week.

The ACLED project ranks Myanmar as the third country in the world with the most drone incidents, behind only Ukraine and Russia. And the LSE study — published this past January by researcher Matthew B. Arnold — concludes that Myanmar is waging “the world’s second most intense conflict for drone warfare.”

Since the 2021 coup, the ACLED project has recorded 6,215 drone incidents in the country. And the conflict monitor confirms to EL PAÍS that the latest numbers show the same trend. Each incident groups together all the attacks against the same location on the same day (meaning that the actual number of drones used is much higher).

From agriculture to war

When Myanmar’s military ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government in February 2021 and violently suppressed the protests, thousands of young people took up arms. They joined the People’s Defense Force (PDF) — the opposition’s armed wing — as well as the ethnic minority armies, which have been fighting the central government for decades. They had no planes or helicopters, and drones became “their entire air force,” according to the ACLED project.

The first drones were agricultural drones purchased from China, designed for spraying crops. They were subsequently adapted by the guerrillas to launch mortar rounds at barracks and convoys. In 2023, they cost around $3,000 apiece, according to the ACLED project.

These drones were crucial in the major offensive at the end of 2023, in which three ethnic minority armies expelled the military from much of the northeast, along the border with China. The rebels launched “wave after wave” of drones at army bases, explains Morgan Michaels, a researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS.

The turning point

The army was slow to react, but it eventually learned from its enemies. In July 2024, the junta created the Drone Force Directorate and purchased between 2,000 and 3,000 agricultural drones from China for retrofitting, according to the LSE. Russia, meanwhile, provided reconnaissance drones and jammers — systems that block communications between drones and their pilots. Furthermore, according to regime sources cited by the IISS, Russian advisors helped establish new military training protocols.

The decisive shift came with China. “From 2021 to the present, there hasn’t been one China; there’ve been many,” explains Inés Arco, a researcher at the Barcelona Center for International Affairs (CIDOB), specializing in Asia-Pacific, in a telephone interview.

Previously — when it was believed that the junta might fall — Beijing maintained contact with various armed groups in Myanmar. But at the end of 2024, it changed its position. According to Arco, China is seeking to secure its border and its investments, and the opposition, fragmented into more than 100 armed groups, cannot guarantee this.

The junta asked Beijing to block the sale of drone parts to the resistance. And the price of an agricultural drone for the guerrillas doubled to around $6,000, according to the ACLED project. China also closed the supply routes of two of the opposition groups that had spearheaded the 2023 offensive and pressured them to sign ceasefire agreements that forced them to withdraw from captured cities.

Beijing now openly supports the junta, Arco explains: “[The Chinese government] is giving [Myanmar’s] military the same drones that initially crossed the border to reach the resistance.” Richard Horsey, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, concurs with this summary in an email response to EL PAÍS: “Beijing has been the most important external factor in the army’s recovery: it has supplied it with fighter jets, drones and anti-drone systems.”

ACLED data show the turning point: the junta launched more drone attacks than the opposition for the first time in December 2024. And, since February 2025, it has done so every month. For instance, in the first eight months of this year, the army has more than tripled its drone attacks compared to the same period in 2024, while the number of drones launched by the resistance has fallen to a quarter of previous levels.

Drones alone don’t explain the gains made by the junta — which also relies on mandatory military service and Chinese pressure on its enemies — but they have changed the battlefield. “The military is clearly being revamped,” says Michaels from the IISS.

A war on the population

The junta uses drones to complement an air force that the resistance cannot counter. “The junta still controls the airspace,” Arco explains. The researcher describes a double-attack strategy: a drone strike followed by an air strike — or vice versa — to also target those who come to the aid of the victims. According to the ACLED project, since June of 2025, 40% of the junta’s drone strikes have targeted civilians. And, between January and August of this year, the number of strikes more than tripled compared to the same period in 2024.

Myanmar’s military has been fighting ethnic minority guerrillas since independence in 1948. What changed with the 2021 coup, explains Queralt Castillo, who, for years, researched Myanmar’s democratic transition, is that the junta also began attacking the civilian population. “This is no longer a war against ethnic organizations. This is a war against the population,” she summarizes.

Cheap versus expensive

The resistance continues to rely on inexpensive equipment, deploying it against expensive targets. And their main weapons are fiber optic drones, which are guided not by radio, but by a cable as thin as fishing line (which, therefore, cannot be blocked by jammers). Each one costs between $500 and $1,000, plus about $200 for the cable, according to a resistance commander quoted by the Japanese media outlet Nikkei Asia. The ACLED project recorded its first use in May of 2025, when the Kachin guerrillas shot down a Russian-made Mi-17 military helicopter, a model that costs around $15 million.

Fiber optic drones were also used in the attack on the Tada-U air base, according to analyst Anthony Davis, who noted this in an article in Asia Times, a Hong Kong-based digital newspaper. The unit that Davis attributes the attack to almost disappeared from the ACLED’s records in 2025 (the year the junta began using jammers more widely), but reappeared in Tada-U with drones that don’t rely on a radio signal.

Neither the government drones nor the resistance drones alone will decide the war. According to Arnold, a researcher at the LSE, drones “cannot resolve the underlying strategic weaknesses of either side,” which increases the risk of a prolonged stalemate.

In an email, Horsey, from the International Crisis Group, describes an arms race, in which each side learns from the other and neither gains the upper hand: “Neither side can achieve drone dominance. And so, the war simply becomes more lethal, increasingly so for civilians.”

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