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Known Knowns and Known Unknowns: Measuring Myanmar’s Military Capabilities
Abstract
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... International conflicts and domestic insurgencies increased military spending (Albalate et al. 2012;Collier 2006). In Burma, foreign invasion triggered military development in the 1950s and insurgencies subsequently motivated new acquisitions of military equipment (Callahan 2003;Selth 1996Selth , 2001. States further spent on their army depending on their wealth (Ball 1993/94). ...
... International conflicts and domestic insurgencies increased military spending (Albalate et al. 2012;Collier 2006). In Burma, foreign invasion triggered military development in the 1950s and insurgencies subsequently motivated new acquisitions of military equipment (Callahan 2003;Selth 1996Selth , 2001. States further spent on their army depending on their wealth (Ball 1993/94). ...
Under Ne Win's rule, Burma lacked a strong military. The army's capacity was only upgraded considerably in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What accounts for its late expansion? I argue that Burma's military upgrade depended on a threat to the regime that would incite autocrats to divert limited resources toward strengthening the army. That threat did not materialize until military rule was unsettled by a social revolution in 1988. Lacking the technology to produce warfare, military development also required strong ties to a state with the capacity to support Burma's expansion. That state was China. The ebb and flow in diplomatic relations between Rangoon and Beijing in the 1960s and 1970s, and China's isolation and military weakness under Mao Zedong made it unlikely to provide military support to Burma then. By the late 1980s, however, Rangoon and Beijing's relations had improved significantly, and China's capacity as a weapons provider had also increased. Burma could, from then on, easily access China's arms market.
... By the 1990s, according to Burmese historian Thant Myint-U, Myanmar was no longer just a military regime 'sitting on top of an otherwise civilian state . . . the military was the state' (Thant 2007, p. 340). 7 In order to do this, the tatmadaw actively rebuilt its organisational capacity by reserving a high proportion of the national budget for the expansion of the military personnel, as well as the upgrading of military hardware, inexplicably just as decades of hostilities largely ceased (Selth 2009, pp. 281 -286, Turnell et al. 2009. ...
... 281 -286, Turnell et al. 2009. Under the SPDC regime, the total number of military personnel nearly doubled in size from 200,000 in 1988 to approximately 350,000 by 2011 (Selth 2009, pp. 281 -286, Holliday 2011. ...
The Myanmar military has long dominated national politics as well as the state apparatus since first coming into power in 1958. Despite a series of challenges to its rule, the military has been able to constantly re-invent itself while re-asserting its dominance over society. Cycles of popular protests and dissatisfaction with military rule have not led to regime change nor weakened the military as a unified institution. The latest incarnation of the nominally civilian government has introduced a series of liberalising reforms that have dramatically opened more socio-political space for opposition and non-state actors to participate in national politics. Despite the somewhat optimistic outlook of a more liberalised Myanmar in the future, the institutional design and historical legacy of the military's role in state-building have ensured that it has enough ‘reserve domains’ to maintain its prominent role within any foreseeable future governments in Myanmar. By tracing the historical development of the Myanmar military regime, this paper argues that current reforms were introduced as a strategy for the military to ensure its continued survival as the primary political actor in Myanmar.
... Under these conditions, Myanmar's military leaders, by this stage under the tutelage of Senior General Than Shwe, sought to dictate the conditions for the gradual (and often secretive) transition of Myanmar society in more open and inclusive directions (Selth 2009). The roadmap to 'discipline-flourishing democracy' which they put in place was, as such, a military-defined process (Thawnghmung and Maung Aung Myoe 2008). ...
This chapter provides the historical context for the February 2021 coup including the previous period of military rule and the period of reform between 2011 and 2021 under President Thein Sein and Aung San Suu Kyi. The last section examines the February 2021 coup, which ended the military’s democratic experiment, and its consequences. As the country adjusted to the imposition of a re-fashioned military dictatorship, under Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the coup-makers faced relentless opposition from a wide range of political and social forces. With the rupture of the previous compromise between democratic and autocratic interests, Myanmar has no easy path back to an electoral framework that readily includes its most successful political parties. In this context, the ongoing struggle to accommodate a wide range of conflicted economic, religious, ethnic and strategic interests has led many anti-coup activists to call for a revolution in Myanmar’s governance. This chapter considers the longer-term consequences of a resurgent coup culture and the challenges facing those seeking to build a more resilient electoral system.
... The next section of the article commences with a summary of Yangon's trajectory in the context of earlier flows of capital and labour as an imperial entrepôt and the postcolonial aftermath when it became subject to new logics of state power under successive military regimes. In turn, these have mutated into a landscape of development that is reworking the city into a renewed domain for the urbanization of capital, this time foregrounding tourism and burgeoning class privilege, enmeshed with the military (Selth, 2009;Prasse-Freeman and Win Latt, 2018). The attendant shifts as well as continuities and resemblances then loom large in our subsequent accounts of security, power and space in Yangon. ...
This article examines how variegated local and transnational interactions are reconfiguring Myanmar's largest city of Yangon. We do this through an analytical focus on frontiers and an empirical focus on how these are secured, drawing on interviews at two Security Expos and street‐level observations in Yangon conducted over three years. Yangon thereby becomes a site for critical reflections about complex and multiple imbrications of frontiers, security and the urban with implications for how these may be conceptualized elsewhere.
... But not all these bunch of intelligence information have, or even need the same level or degree of secrecy, credibility, acceptance, and consumable status (Selth, 2009;Giupponi & Fabbrini, 2010;Rebugio, 2013;Gainor & Bouthillier, 2014). Accordingly, the more non-compacted and systematically clustered intelligence and security institutions are organised in a Stateassuming full ownership and responsibility with particular reference to each of the traditionally known purposes of intelligence information as narrated above the highly it becomes pursuable to maintain accountable, legitimate, public interest-oriented, flexible and purpose-based management of the entire intelligence and security operation of the state. ...
This article questions the supreme role of the Ethiopian National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) in the prevention and countering of alleged terrorist acts vis-à-vis its institutional legitimacy and operational integrity. With no exception to other states, Ethiopia also re-established the National Intelligence and Security Service in 2013 but as a sole and unique institution of its kind with multiplex mandates both on general and specific intelligence and security matters. Having in mind the more sensitive powers conferred to the institution and its unrivalled authority in masterminding all the preventive and punitive measures against alleged terrorist conducts as enshrined under the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation of the country, this article examines whether the establishing proclamation has set the required normative standards and watchdogging institutional platforms to ensure its functional accountability. After investigating the Service’s organizational structure, the public, judicial and political watchdogging apparatuses, the lack of administrative and financial transparency, as well as the alleged alliance of the institution to the regime in power, this article submits that the Ethiopian National Intelligence and Security Service lacks the key attributes of a politically independent and functionally autonomous institution that strives to protect the nation’s politico-economic and security interests. As it stands, much of the Services’s mission rather appears to have been constricted to serving as an untouchable guardian of the party or the regime in power, or as a rising unique entity that roams on its own impervious orbit.
... Even now, after the political opening of 2011, reliable data about such basic matters as their size, budget, order of battle, and combat capabilities are still very difficult to obtain. 149 It is unlikely that even the civilians in Aung San Suu Kyi's government have access to all the relevant information. Particularly sensitive matters, such as the details of Myanmar's shadowy relationship with North Korea and its suspected missile production program, are probably known only to a small group of senior Tatmadaw officers. ...
THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS (CFR)AND MYANMAR
https://www.cfr.org/asia/myanmar
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens
in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries. Founded in 1921, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Our goal is to start a conversation in this country about the need for Americans to better understand the world.
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23575&LangID=E
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/rohingya-crisis
https://www.cfr.org/blog/extensive-report-suggests-myanmar-military-thoroughly-planned-crimes-against-humanity-rakhine
... There are other serious and possibly more intractable problems arising from the limited human experience of Burma " s public servants in designing and implementing public policy aimed at increasing general welfare, which will impede any real reform in the statutory and actual system of taxation. One of the greatest impediments to the establishment of a reasonable administration to govern the system of taxation is the policy of the SLORC and SPDC of providing limited financing to the lower levels of the military, such that between 300,000 and 400,000 soldiers have had permission to tax and garner resources from the private sector (Selth, 2009). This serious impediment to reform is exacerbated by the taxation imposed by other armed groups and militias that have arisen out of the civil war and opposition to military rule. ...
Burma has a very low official tax ratio and the important political reforms that began in 2011 have contributed to an emerging debate inside Burma that the system of taxation is need of reform, in order to increase the amount of tax revenue available to the central government to fund desperately needed expenditure on infrastructure, health and education. Despite the low official tax ratio there is considerable evidence that households and businesses in those states that border, Bangladesh, China, India and Thailand, where Burma"s ethnic minorities are located are subject to heavy rates of taxation by range of different agencies associated with the state and the various militias that purport to represent the interests of Burma"s ethnic minorities. If the system of taxation is to be successfully reformed the actual system of taxation that exists in these states needs itself to be overhauled.
The research thesis aims at analysing the use and recruitment of child soldiers in Myanmar under international law. The phenomenon of child soldiers is a complex and heinous issue that jeopardises the life, education, physical health and psychological development of the young people.
According to international standards, a child is defined as a person under the age of eighteen. A child soldier is defined as any person below eighteen years of age who is, or who has been, recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, spies or for sexual purposes. In line with the evolution of armed conflicts on the international stage, the concept of childhood has been reshaped and suited to fit the new exigencies of non-international armed conflicts.
The research takes a deductive stance, departing from a general overview of the relevant international norms and entities to shed light on the case study of Myanmar and the international actors concerned. The leitmotiv at the basis of the research is the state-centric approach of the international Human Rights system.
Over the past decade, Myanmar has undergone several changes in the way it is governed from a formalized military junta to a mixed civilian and military system. There remain, however, multiple challenges to the well-being of people in Myanmar, and human insecurity disproportionately affects ethnic nationalities and minority groups. This chapter identifies three significant challenges to achieving human-centered governance in Myanmar: (1) trust-building with the military to cede power; (2) building bureaucratic capacity to fulfill election promises and establish the rule of law at the national and local levels; and (3) developing an effective political party system. As a result of these challenges, the prospects of a democratic system of government remain dim in the near term and addressing human insecurity will be incremental in nature.
This article traces the revenue category and legal concept of the Waste Land in Burma/Myanmar from its original application by the British colonial apparatus in the nineteenth century, to its later use in tandem with Burma Army counterinsurgent tactics starting in the 1960s, and finally to the 2012 land laws and current issues in international investment. This adaptation of colonial ideas about territorialization in the context of an ongoing civil war offers a new angle for understanding the relationship between military tactics and the political economy of conflict and counterinsurgent strategies which crucially depended on giving local militias—both government and nongovernment—high degrees of autonomy. The recent government changes, including the more civilian representation in parliament and its shift to engage with Western economies, raise questions regarding the future of the military, as well as local autonomy and the rural peasantry's access to land. As increasing numbers of international investors are poised to enter the Myanmar market, this article will revisit notions of land use and appropriation, and finally the role of the army and its changing relationship with Waste Lands.
The rise of China is the primary cause of changing strategic dynamics in Asia. China's growing economic, military and political weight is shaping regional and individual destinies of its neighbours, particularly in Southeast Asia. Despite the academic debate over its future, Chinese influence is burgeoning and this has major implications for other Asian powers such as India, Japan, Russia, and the offshore balancer, the United States. This paper examines Chinese strategic gains in the Southeast Asian region in the areas of trade, regional diplomacy and cross-border connectivity. It also seeks to understand why India, unlike China, has not managed to integrate as closely with Southeast Asia despite using policies similar to that of China.
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