The first phase of Myanmar's drone war belonged to the rebels. In the forests, hills, and borderlands, where young fighters had few bullets, fewer heavy weapons, and no air force, small commercial drones became a kind of improvised equaliser. They watched military columns from above, dropped explosives on outposts, guided ground assaults, and gave scattered resistance groups something the junta had long monopolised: the ability to strike from the sky.
Now, the war has entered a more dangerous second phase. The military regime, stung by years of drone attacks, has copied the resistance playbook, expanded its own drone fleet, and begun using unmanned aircraft to track, harass, and attack anti-junta forces. In response, resistance groups are no longer only using drones to attack. They are trying to survive them, with jammers, shoot-downs, improvised countermeasures, and, increasingly, reported FPV-style interceptor tactics.
Myanmar's civil war is becoming a drone war that is starting to fight itself.
Since the February 2021 coup, when the military overthrew the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar has fractured into a nationwide conflict involving the junta, long-established ethnic armed organisations, post-coup People's Defense Forces, and groups aligned with the shadow National Unity Government. The humanitarian toll has been catastrophic. Thousands have been killed and millions displaced. But the military balance has also changed in ways few expected in the first months after the coup.
The resistance began with almost nothing. Many of its recruits were students, programmers, engineers, delivery riders, farmers and former urban protesters who fled into jungles and borderlands after the junta crushed street demonstrations. They were outgunned by a military with Russian and Chinese aircraft, artillery, armored vehicles and decades of experience fighting ethnic insurgencies.
But they had something else: access to the global consumer-drone economy.
Commercial quadcopters, agricultural drones, online tutorials, 3D printers, spare parts and cross-border smuggling networks became part of Myanmar's new insurgent logistics chain. ACLED, the conflict monitor, says resistance groups first used drones in December 2021 in Pale township, Sagaing Region. Since then, it has recorded more than 2,100 resistance drone strike events across more than 600 locations. Drones have become the resistance's "entire air force."
Specialised units emerged. Federal Wings and Cloud Wings became known for drone operations linked to the Karen resistance ecosystem. Shar Htoo Waw became a hub for drone knowledge, training and adaptation. Some groups used quadcopters and hexacopters; others built fixed-wing drones with longer range. They added cameras, first-person-view features, larger payloads and one-way attack designs.
The way anti-junta forces obtain and build this technology is central to the story. It is not a single pipeline. It is a marketplace war.
Some drones are imported as commercial or agricultural systems, often through border routes with China and Thailand. The Chin National Army showed The Guardian a fleet of commercial and agricultural drones, saying many were imported from China and some from Western countries; commanders said equipment moved largely through the China and Thailand borders rather than India, where controls were tighter.
Other groups buy components part by part. Reuters reported that a rebel unit called the Angry Bird Drone Rangers, led by a former long-distance bus driver, began with small DJI drones for reconnaissance, then built larger armed UAVs using instructions gathered from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Several drone components were available on regional e-commerce platforms.
In eastern Myanmar, a network engineer known as "3D" upgraded 3D printers that were used by the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force to produce drones, mortar stabilisers and other battlefield tools. One fixed-wing drone design, inspired by Ukraine's improvised drone ecosystem, used 3D-printed frames and other components smuggled across the Thai border. The reported production cost was around $5,000 per drone once parts were available.
This is not a polished defense industry. It is a wartime cottage industry stitched together from diaspora donations, border trade, internet learning, local workshops, and battlefield iteration. Some drone teams operate under camouflage netting. Others charge phones and laptops with solar panels or generators, use Starlink for internet access, and rely on 3D printers because replacement parts can take months to arrive through jungle routes.
The early results were dramatic.
During Operation 1027, the major anti-junta offensive launched in late 2023 by the Three Brotherhood Alliance and its allies, resistance forces used drone swarms to batter military positions in northern Shan State. Local reports indicated one retreating soldier describing bombs falling from drones "like rain." The drones did not replace infantry, but they helped break the junta's defensive rhythm: reconnaissance first, drone strikes next, ground assault after that.
The symbolism peaked in April 2024, when resistance forces said they launched coordinated drone attacks on military targets in Naypyitaw, the junta's fortified capital. The National Unity Government said special units of the People's Defense Force targeted the airport and military headquarters; the junta said it destroyed or seized more than a dozen drones. Even without independently verified damage, the attack pierced the aura of the capital's security. But the junta was watching.
By 2024, the military had begun building its own version of the rebel drone war. Myanmar's military started procuring thousands of Chinese commercial UAVs, including agricultural-style drones, and modifying them to carry locally manufactured munitions. The irony was that the weapons that had helped rebels embarrass one of Southeast Asia's most feared militaries were now appearing in the hands of that military.
ACLED says the military's investment accelerated after the resistance's battlefield successes. The junta began using drones not merely as gadgets but as part of a combined aerial campaign: reconnaissance drones to locate resistance positions, artillery guided by aerial surveillance, kamikaze drones that hover before striking, and night-capable systems with infrared and thermal sensors.
The numbers show the shift. The conflict in Myanmar now ranks third globally for drone events, behind only Ukraine and Russia. It has recorded more than 570 military drone strikes against resistance groups and civilians in at least 340 locations, causing at least 191 deaths, including at least 158 civilians.
This has changed the battlefield psychology. Resistance fighters who once forced junta soldiers to hide from drones are now themselves vulnerable to constant observation from above. In December 2025, the military had access to 19 UAV models, including fixed-wing and multi-rotor drones made in China, Russia and Iran. Conventional airstrikes remained the junta's most-used air tactic, but they were increasingly guided by intelligence from reconnaissance and surveillance drones.
The junta's foreign links matter. China remains a crucial commercial and geopolitical actor around Myanmar. Russia has supplied much of the military's aircraft and arms, and Russian tactics from Ukraine appear to be filtering into Myanmar's war. In March 2026, reports surfaced that Russian weapons and methods seen in Ukraine were shaping Myanmar's civil war, from aircraft to waves of conscripts.
The drone supply chain is also testing sanctions regimes. The Conflict Armament Research reported that Myanmar's military had obtained European-made anti-jamming navigation technology through a Chinese company and fitted it to drones recovered in conflict zones. The finding underscored a broader problem: many drone components are dual-use, commercially available, and easy to move through intermediaries.
For civilians, the effect is a widening air war.
Junta airpower now includes jets, helicopters, drones, paramotors, and gyrocopters. The low-tech end of that arsenal is especially chilling. The military has increasingly used commercial paramotors and gyrocopters to attack civilians and opposition forces, sometimes dropping mortar shells by hand and gliding silently toward targets. Fortify Rights counted 304 paramotor and gyrocopter attacks on civilians between December 2024 and January 11, 2026.
Myanmar Peace Monitor recorded 55 drone strike events between January 1 and February 25, 2026; 40 were attributed to the junta. Of those junta events, 26 targeted civilians, internally displaced people's camps, hospitals or schools, killing 11 civilians and wounding 24, according to its count. One February attack in Khin-U Township killed a man and his 16-year-old daughter and injured three children. The war is now pushing the resistance into a counter-drone phase.
Some fighters still rely on rifles, machine guns, and luck to bring down low-flying drones or paramotors. Others are trying electronic warfare, but the resistance groups remain vulnerable because they lack sufficient jamming technology and air-defense systems.
More striking is the emergence of FPV-style attacks against junta aircraft. In May 2025, the Kachin Independence Army and allied fighters claimed to have used a first-person-view drone to bring down a junta Mi-17 helicopter near Bhamo. The junta said the aircraft crashed because of mechanical failure. But Independent OSINT groups and analysts, analyzing the video, commented that the footage appeared to show an FPV drone closing on the helicopter before an explosion near the rotor area.
That incident is the clearest sign of Myanmar's next battlefield frontier. The resistance is not yet fielding a mature, centralised counter-drone shield. Much of the evidence for drone-on-drone or drone-on-aircraft interception remains fragmentary, local and difficult to verify. But the direction is unmistakable: as the junta turns the rebels' drone tactics against them, anti-junta forces are being forced to think less like insurgents with hobby drones and more like an air-defense network.
That is the significance of Myanmar's drone war. Ukraine showed the world how cheap drones could transform conventional battlefields. Myanmar is showing something different: how drone warfare diffuses into a fragmented civil war, where insurgents, ethnic armies, diaspora networks, e-commerce supply chains, foreign patrons and sanctions loopholes all become part of the same aerial ecosystem.
The junta did not invent Myanmar's drone battlefield. It learned it from its enemies. Now those enemies must learn how to defeat the very system they helped prove.
In the first years after the coup, drones gave the resistance a way to look down on a military that had always looked down on them from the sky. In the next phase, the question is whether they can keep that sky contested, or whether the junta's copied, imported and upgraded drone war will turn the resistance's greatest innovation into one more threat it has to survive.
(The writer is a Singapore-based data and Open-Source Intelligence analyst)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
