Armed groups fighting Myanmar's military regime are losing the edge they had built up in the use of drones in the civil war set off by the 2021 coup — and may even be falling behind, experts and resistance fighters said.

"The military has been rapidly closing the gap in drone use," the US research group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) said in a report in July, The War From the Sky: How Drone Warfare Is Shaping the Conflict in Myanmar.

Though both sides continue to build up and improve their drone arsenals, the report found that "2025 appears to be the year that the military may gain a clear advantage."

Su Mon Thant, the report's author, told DW that the resistance groups' drone units cannot match the military's resources or its ties with China, which has been working to help Myanmar's besieged junta survive.

"They cannot compete against the military," she said. "The military has a lot of money compared to the resistance groups. When they are trying to get two drones in three months, the military can order a thousand drones from China at once."

Taking the lead

Su Mon Thant said resistance groups took an early lead in the conflict's drone warfare with the help of young digital natives from the cities who headed for the country's rugged borderlands to join forces with the ethnic rebel armies already set up there and shared their know-how.

By pouring over YouTube tutorials and videos of the war in Ukraine, they taught themselves to use commercial drones for valuable reconnaissance and modify them into killing machines, or to build their own with whatever plastic, plywood and electronic scraps they could scrounge and 3D-printing the rest.

Su Mon Thant, the ACLED analyst, said their drones have helped cut down on their casualties and amplify their more modest resources to help them take on and mostly push back a far larger foe, in a textbook case of asymmetric warfare.

Crucially, she added, the smaller People's Defense Forces kicked up by the coup to resist the junta used their drone prowess to help them win the respect and cooperation of the larger and better-armed rebel armies, or Ethnic Resistance Organizations (EROs), on the borders.

Their alliances have been key to the losses the resistance has inflicted on the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, which is now believed to be in control of less than half of the Southeast Asian nation.

Drones have been vital to the resistance groups' gains, said Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington who studies Southeast Asia's insurgencies.

"They were so creative. The EROs may have been experimenting with [drones], but then you had the coup and this exodus of some very tech-savvy students who show up in the jungle, they're working with the EROs, they're starting to stand up the People's Defense Forces, and this was their asymmetric weapon," he told DW. "This is the future of warfare."

Battle tested

Abuza says virtually every one of the larger resistance groups in the country now has a drone unit of its own.

In eastern Myanmar's Karenni state, on the border with Thailand, the drone unit of the Karenni National Defense Force is led by a 27-year-old IT engineer who goes by the alias 3D, a nod, he says, to his skill with a 3D printer.

3D, who declined to give his real name for safety reasons, pointed out that his team of about 60 is using drones in nearly every battle the KNDF now fights with the military — for reconnaissance, bombing runs, or flying into targets and exploding on impact.

He said these so-called kamikaze drones can cost as little as a few hundred dollars.

"It's really, really important in this war, because without drones we can't fight our enemy efficiently and [with] less casualties," he told DW over the phone from the front lines.

To the north of 3D and his team, in Shan state, a trio of EROs and their allied PDFs made full use of their own drones in Operation 1027, a months-long campaign in late 2023 that handed the military its largest single territorial defeat of the war.

The resistance groups are believed to have dropped some 20,000 bombs on the military with their drones. A soldier for the military told BBC Burmese at the time that the bombs would fall in waves "like rain."

Su Mon Thant, of ACLED, said it was a "wake-up call" for the military to take its own drone operations more seriously.

Since then, top junta officials have made repeated trips to China to tour its drone factories and bought military-grade models from both China and Russia. This past May, pro-junta media reported that the military had also set up a dedicated drone force with training from China, Russia and India.

All jammed up

The analysts say the military's addition of infrared cameras to their drones, capable of peering through walls and the cover of night, has also made its drone, jet and artillery strikes on resistance targets far more precise and deadly.

At the same time, the military has severely eroded the resistance groups' own drone operations by ringing its larger bases with powerful jammers and sending portable jamming units into the field with their soldiers.

"Now, almost every major battalion has jammers, and their jammers are upgraded," said Su Mon Thant. "It's effectively disrupting the resistance groups' drones."

On top of that, at the junta's request, Beijing late last year started restricting the export to Myanmar of dual-use items, including drones, making them harder and more expensive for resistance groups to acquire.

Abuza said resistance groups are finding ways around this, for example, by shopping for parts rather than pre-assembled drones and looking beyond China, their main source to date.

"They [the Chinese] definitely tightened things up, but at the end of the day there are so many providers, the supply chains are long, they have people combing through tech malls in southern China for the parts and things they need. So, while China may have slowed the process of acquisition, they certainly didn't stop it," he said.

But according to ACLED's latest data, China's export controls and the junta's new jammers are exacting a heavy toll on the resistance groups' drones.

Fading fortunes

After climbing steadily since the coup, the ACLED report stated, drone strikes by resistance groups have been falling sharply since early 2024, just about when the military's own drone strikes started to spike.

According to the research group, resistance groups launched over 130 drone strike events in January 2024 — each of which might include more than one strike on the same target — to the military's five or six. By February 2025, their numbers had reversed for the first time, with nearly 50 drone strike events by the military and less than 40 by the resistance.

Su Mon Thant said drones may not turn the tide of the civil war but noted that the military is using them more often to help stall resistance offensives and even force some retreats.

Her interviews with resistance fighters also suggest that the military's drones are killing many more resistance fighters than reported by local media, in a civil war ACLED estimates has already claimed some 80,000 lives.

On the front lines of the civil war, in the jungles of Karenni state, 3D echoes the analysts' assessments.

He said the military's drones are getting better at finding their targets, while its jammers are wreaking havoc on their own drones and China's export controls are making it "really, really hard" to buy or build more.

The KNDF and the rest of the resistance may be getting outspent, outgunned and now out-droned, he said, "but we have to struggle."

Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru