In flip-flops and shorts, one of the top soldiers in a resistance force fighting the military junta in Myanmar showed off his weapons. It was, he apologized, mostly in pieces.
Rebel Ko Shan Gyi glued plastic panels shaped by a 3D printer. Nearby, electrical innards from Chinese-made drones used for agricultural purposes were laid out on the ground, their wires exposed as if awaiting surgery.
Other parts needed to build homemade drones, including pieces of polystyrene dotted with propellers, cluttered two cabins with leaf walls. Together, they could be considered to some extent the armory of the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force. A laser cutter was ready halfway through creating a flight control unit. The generator that powered the workshop had broken down. We didn’t know when there would be electricity again.
Despite the disparate conditions, rebel drone units have managed to upset the balance of power in Myanmar. In many ways, the army that wrested power from a civilian administration in Myanmar three years ago is far larger and better equipped than the hundreds of militias fighting to reconquer the country. The junta has Russian fighter planes and Chinese missiles.
But with little more than instructions posted online and parts ordered from China, resistance forces have added ballast to what could look like a hopelessly asymmetrical civil war. The techniques they use would not be foreign to Ukrainian, Yemeni or Sudanese soldiers.
Across the world, new capabilities embedded in consumer technology are changing conflicts. Starlink connections provide internet. 3D printers can mass produce parts. But no product is more important than the cheap drone.
In Gaza last year, Hamas used low-cost drones to blind monitored Israeli checkpoints. In Syria and Yemen, drones fly alongside missiles, forcing U.S. troops to make difficult decisions about whether to resort to costly countermeasures to bring down a $500 toy. On both sides of the war in Ukraine, innovation has transformed the humble drone into a human-guided missile.
The world’s underequipped forces often learn from each other. Drone pilots in Myanmar describe turning to groups on chat apps like Discord and Telegram to download 3D printing plans for fixed-wing drones. They also learn how to hack commercial drones’ default software that could reveal their locations.
Many also benefit from the original use of these amateur gadgets: the video sequences they produce. In both Ukraine and Myanmar, videos of killings are played to upbeat music and shared on social media to boost morale and help raise funds.
“It’s exponential growth, and it’s happening everywhere,” said Samuel Bendett, a researcher at the Center for New American Security who studies drone warfare. “You can go to YouTube and learn how to assemble, on Telegram you can get an idea of tactics and tips on pilot training.”
In Myanmar, both sides now fear the whir of propeller blades churning the air above them. But without the junta’s air power, the resistance must rely much more on drones to fight to overthrow the army and win some sort of civilian rule. Drones operated by rebels have helped capture Myanmar’s military outposts simply by flying over the country and scaring soldiers into fleeing. They terrorized the trenches. And they have made possible large-scale offensives in junta-controlled territory, targeting police stations and small military bases.
As the most skilled pilot in his rebel unit, Mr. Shan Gyi said he had racked up dozens of successful strikes by flying drones with slight movements of joysticks on a video game controller. Larger homemade drones can carry nearly 70 pounds of bombs capable of blowing up a house. Most, however, are smaller and carry several 60-millimeter mortar rounds, enough to kill soldiers.
“When I was a kid, I didn’t play video games,” Mr. Shan Gyi said. “When I hit the bullseye on the battlefield, I feel so happy.”
“A technological disruptor mindset”
The head of the militia’s drone unit, nicknamed 3D because of his success printing drone parts, may seem like an atypical rebel. A computer technology graduate, 3D remembers the first time he assembled a 3D printer during his college years.
“Not so difficult,” he said.
Looking to put his skills to good use when he joined the resistance movement, he first tried his hand at printing guns. When they weren’t working well, he turned his attention to drones, which he had read were redefining warfare in other parts of the world.
“They had a tech disruptor type mentality,” said Richard Horsey, senior Myanmar adviser to the International Crisis Group. “A lot of innovation happened.”
As 3D set about building his fighting force, he had no training manual. Instead, he consulted with other young civilians to create similar units across Myanmar. After the coup and brutally suppressed protests in 2021, young people growing up in digitally connected Myanmar headed into the jungle to fight.
Although none of the ten pilots on his team had flown a drone before the coup, they immersed themselves in online chat rooms, learning how to convert drones designed to spray pesticides for more deadly use , against humans.
“The Internet is very useful,” 3D said. “If we want, we can talk to people everywhere, in Ukraine, in Palestine, in Syria. »
Dozens of drone units are scattered across Myanmar, and a few are all-female. In 2022, Ma Htet Htet joins a militia fighting in central Myanmar.
“I was assigned a role as a cook because they were hesitant to put me on the front line just because I’m a girl,” she said.
Last year, Ms Htet Htet, now 19, joined a drone unit. This job puts her on the front lines, as drone pilots must operate in the heat of a conflict zone. The 26-year-old leader of her unit is still recovering from shrapnel wounds during the battle. Women make their own bombs by mixing TNT and aluminum powder, then layer metal balls and gunpowder around the volatile core.
From October 2021 to June 2023, the non-profit association Center for Information Resilience verified 1,400 online videos of drone flights carried out by groups fighting the Myanmar military, the majority of which were attacks. At the start of 2023, the group declared that it was documenting 100 thefts per month.
Over time, the use of drones has expanded from commercially available quadcopters made by companies like DJI to a broader range, including improvised drones like those made by 3D.
A game of cat and mouse
Recently, 3D went on a shopping spree. He sought a solution perfected in the trenches of Ukraine’s front lines to a problem he and his pilots faced: Russian-made jammers that could eliminate drones by jamming their signals.
A few months after 3D trained its drone army, the junta began using jamming technology from China and Russia to jam the GPS signals that guide the drones to their targets.
3D is looking for ways to fight back. When the Myanmar military sends its drones to pursue rebel fighters, it must suspend jamming, opening a window through which it can also send its own air fleet.
New first-person view, or FPV, drones offer another potential solution to the problem of breaching electronic defenses. Amateur racing drones repurposed as human-piloted weapons, FPVs may be less vulnerable to jamming because they are manually controlled rather than GPS-guided, and they can sometimes be flown around interference emitted by drone defenses.
The latest drones have reshaped the conflict in Ukraine, and parts needed to make FPVs have been distributed to Myanmar rebels in recent months. But they are much more difficult to fly than conventional drones, flown with glasses that allow the pilot to see from the drone’s point of view. In Ukraine, pilots often train for hundreds of hours on simulators before getting the chance to fly in combat.
On a recent afternoon, while the rebel forces’ generator was running, a drone pilot, Ko Sai Laung, sat in a bamboo hut honing his skills on a laptop loaded with Ukrainian drone simulation software.
He held a joystick in his hands, occasionally wiping sweat from his face as he piloted a virtual drone over simulations of Ukrainian farmland toward Russian tanks. It crashed and crashed again.
“I’m tired,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “But I have to keep training.”
Target the capital
On April 4, a Myanmar shadow government formed by ousted lawmakers and others announced that a fleet of drones, launched by an armed pro-democracy group, had attacked three targets in Myanmar’s capital: the military headquarters , an air base and the home of senior officials. General Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the junta.
Despite the shadow government’s enthusiasm, none of the kamikaze drones caused significant damage that day. A New York Times analysis of satellite images found no apparent evidence of smoke, burning or other signs of a successful strike.
Yet simply flying drones so close to the nerve center of the Myanmar military constitutes a powerful psychological weapon in itself. Naypyidaw, the capital of Myanmar, was built from scratch in the early 2000s as a fortress city.
The aim of the drone attack on Naypyidaw, said Dr. Sasa, the shadow government spokesman, was not so much to kill as to send a signal to the junta that it “should not feel comfortable moving freely indoors and outdoors.”
Such operations, however, are a one-way mission for carefully constructed drones, and may require sacrificing dozens of them at a time in the hope that just one of them can slip through defenses. Opposition fighters lack sufficient funding and a reliable supply of spare parts. Parts and munitions that can be assembled by hand into a preferred multirotor drone model, capable of carrying heavier loads, cost more than $27,500, 3D said.
Yet the fighting and losses continue.
On March 20, Mr. Shan Gyi, the star pilot of the rebel forces, was flying a drone from a point on the front line. Suddenly, a much more menacing flying machine – a junta fighter jet – screamed overhead. His bombs hit, 3D later explained, and Mr. Shan Gyi was killed in action. He was 22 years old.
Mu Yi Xiao reports contributed.
