As the war in Myanmar’s Arakan State enters a decisive phase, one pattern has become impossible to ignore: the military council’s growing reliance on air power to strike former army bases it has already lost to the Arakan Army (AA). Far from signaling strength, these attacks reveal a regime that is losing control on the ground and clinging to symbols of authority in a conflict that is steadily slipping beyond its grasp.
On February 7, junta aircraft bombed the headquarters of Strategic Operations Command 15 in Buthidaung Township, territory the AA fully seized in May 2024. Reports indicate that the strikes did not merely hit abandoned military infrastructure but also affected areas where prisoners of war and their family members were being held, with casualties still being assessed.
This was not an isolated incident. In recent months, the junta has repeatedly targeted former military installations across Arakan: from a Regional Military Command site in Minbya Township in January to abandoned battalion bases in Ponnagyun Township last year. Each strike has left behind shattered buildings and unexploded ordnance but little evidence of strategic gain.
To understand this campaign, it must be placed within the wider military, humanitarian, and political landscape of Arakan and Myanmar as a whole.
A Ground War Lost, an Air War Escalated
Since late 2023, the balance of power in Arakan has shifted dramatically. The Arakan Army now controls most of the state, including key towns, transport routes, and border areas. The junta has lost effective ground control over at least 14 townships and has been pushed back to a handful of urban strongholds, most notably Sittwe.
Deprived of territorial dominance, logistics corridors, and local intelligence networks, the military council has increasingly turned to air power as its primary tool of warfare. Fighter jets, helicopter gunships, and transport aircraft retrofitted for bombing have become substitutes for ground forces the junta can no longer deploy safely or sustainably.
But air power alone cannot hold territory. As military analysts have long noted, control over land requires troops, administration, and local compliance none of which can be delivered from the sky. Bombing former bases does not reclaim them; it merely destroys what the junta itself once built.
An Arakan military observer captured the logic bluntly: “If you can’t have the meat, you scatter sand on it.” The fear driving these attacks is clear: that the AA might reuse intact bunkers, barracks, and command structures as operational hubs. By reducing these sites to rubble, the junta hopes to deny the AA that advantage. In doing so, it also exposes its own strategic anxiety.
Humanitarian Fallout and the Normalisation of Civilian Harm
The human cost of this air campaign is severe and growing. On January 20, an airstrike hit a prisoner-of-war detention site near Kyauktaw Township, killing at least 21 detainees and family members and injuring dozens more. Similar strikes have repeatedly landed near civilian neighborhoods, displacement sites, and villages far from any active front line.
This pattern reflects a broader shift in junta tactics across Myanmar. As resistance forces, ethnic armed organisations and People’s Defence Forces alike expand their territorial control, the military has increasingly treated entire regions as hostile zones. Airstrikes, artillery, and long-range attacks are used not only to target armed opponents but to punish populations perceived as living under resistance control.
In Arakan, where humanitarian access is already heavily restricted, these attacks compound an existing crisis. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been displaced. Food insecurity is rising. Medical services are scarce. Telecommunications blackouts isolate entire townships from emergency assistance. Bombing former bases in such conditions does not merely destroy military relics; it deepens civilian suffering in an already fragile environment.
Politics, Legitimacy, and the Battle for Narrative
Beyond military calculations, the junta’s air war is also a political act. Each strike is intended to signal continued sovereignty over Arakan to domestic audiences, hardline supporters, and external actors who still frame Myanmar’s crisis as a stalemate.
Yet the effect is increasingly the opposite.
For the Arakan Army, these airstrikes reinforce a narrative of momentum and legitimacy. The AA presents itself as the de facto authority on the ground capable of holding territory, administering areas, and protecting communities even as the junta bombs from afar. Every destroyed former base becomes further evidence that the military council cannot govern Arakan, only punish it.
Nationally, this dynamic mirrors a wider reality. Across Myanmar, the junta is fighting not just an insurgency but a profound crisis of legitimacy. It no longer rules by consent in large parts of the country. Its authority depends on force, and increasingly, on force applied from the air.
War A with No Clear End
Having lost much of Arakan, the military council continues to speak of counteroffensives and territorial recovery. In practice, its options are narrowing. Air superiority without ground control is not a strategy, it is an admission of defeat dressed up as resolve.
This is why the air war in Arakan matters beyond the state itself. It illustrates the trajectory of Myanmar’s conflict as a whole: a regime that can still destroy but can no longer rule; resistance forces that consolidate territory yet face relentless aerial punishment; and civilians trapped between them.
The international community should be clear-eyed. The junta’s air campaign may look assertive, but it is strategically hollow and humanitarianly catastrophic. Without serious pressure to halt airstrikes and expand humanitarian access, Arakan’s suffering will deepen and Myanmar’s fragmentation will harden.
Sittwe and the towns across Arakan are not just battlefields. They are homes, histories, and communities caught in a war that increasingly rewards destruction over control. Bombing the ruins of lost power will not restore the junta’s authority. It will only ensure that the wounds of this conflict run deeper, and last longer, than any runway or bunker it seeks to erase.
Aung Marm Oo is the Editor-in-Chief and Executive Director of Development Media Group (DMG), a news agency based in Arakan (Rakhine) State. He faces charges under Myanmar’s Unlawful Associations Act and has been in hiding since May 2019.
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