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."

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........

© Deutsche Welle