Two years later, an assessment of what the junta has gained through conscription

Kyaw Aung’s life took an unexpected turn on a December morning in 2024, when he encountered a group of men on the way home from his job at a slaughterhouse. The group included both soldiers in uniform and civilians, he said. They stopped Kyaw Aung, who was in 20s, to inspect his documents. They then put him in handcuffs and arrested him, later beating and punching him before taking him to the Bayinnaung Interrogation Camp in Yangon’s Hlaing Township. Myint, a 22-year-old living in Yangon’s Thaketa Township, was waiting to take the bus home from work one night when he, too, was stopped by a group in both uniforms and plainclothes. They took Myint to Thaketa Police Station No. 1 and told him he had a choice: join the army or go to prison. But they had no interest in his answer, Myint said. He chose to go to prison, but they sent him to basic training anyway. The stories of Kyaw Aung and Myint, both arrested without cause and forcibly recruited, exemplify the sense of insecurity that weighs on young Myanmar men every day in a major city like Yangon, where they know they could be abducted and coerced into fighting for the regime at any time. The junta, which has open battlefronts across the country, revived the decade-old conscription law—the People’s Military Service Law—in February 10, 2024 to replenish its depleted fighting force, and has been enforcing it ever since by trapping young men and forcing them to become soldiers. Sweeping up new recruits in “batches” or “intakes” of 5,000 each, the junta has now reached Intake No. 21 and added tens of thousands of new soldiers to its army. Two years of conscription The junta lost control of hundreds of military bases—including two Regional Military Command (RMC) headquarters—and dozens of towns across Myanmar after anti-regime forces launched a coordinated offensive in late 2023, dubbed “Operation 1027”. The regime reactivated the People’s Military Service Law—originally drafted under former military dictator Senior General Than Shwe and suspended for more than a decade—in hopes that it would give them the manpower needed to recapture the territory. The conscription law, signed and reactivated on February 10, 2024, authorised the military regime to recruit any adult as a soldier according to national security needs.Men aged between 18 and 35 and women between 18 and 27 could be summoned to serve for up to two years, according to the law, with the age range extended to 45 for men and 35 for women for doctors, engineers, technicians, or other professionals with training and skills of use to the military. Conscripts in Intake No. 21, one of the batches of 5,000 new soldiers recruited by the military under the People’s Military Service Law, in Hopong, southern Shan State on January 18 of this year While the junta claimed to use a lottery system to select the first batches of recruits, it soon became clear they were using other methods. With collaboration from local military and administrative authorities, they began seeking out or fabricating pretexts to arrest young people, seizing them in the cities before forcing them into basic training. After escaping this form of forcible recruitment and taking refuge with resistance forces, five young men from Yangon, Mandalay, and Bago regions told Myanmar Now about their experiences. Four of them said they had been snatched from the streets, while the fifth said he was detained when junta authorities conducted an unannounced raid of his home. In a January 4 statement, the Ministry of Human Rights of the publicly mandated National Unity Government (NUG)—the cabinet formed and endorsed by ousted members of parliament following the 2021 coup—claimed to know of 31,729 people forcibly recruited between the reinstatement of the conscription law and December 2025. The junta works through local institutions and authorities to take young people captive, at all hours of the day and night, in cities where its control is secure, according to local residents. These cities include Kale, Sagaing, and Monywa in Sagaing Region; Mawlamyine and Mudon in Mon State; Mandalay; and Yangon. “During busy times, at busy intersections, at Seikkantha, Tahang, the station junction traffic lights, the Pinlone traffic lights; in downtown Kale at the traffic lights, sometimes they even grab the youth while they wait for the signal to change,” a man from Kale said. “They usually simply grab people. If the young people have motorbikes, they load the motorbikes onto the truck,” he added. The junta initially opened military training courses at 15 centres in areas securely under their control in Shan State, Ayeyarwady Region, Mon State, and Mandalay Region, later expanding the number to 27, according to the research organisation Myanmar Defence and Security Institute (MDSI). MDSI, founded by defectors from the military who later joined the anti-junta Civil Disobedience Movement, released a report on the junta’s recruitment procedures under the conscription law last November. Along with other observers, they concluded that the military had met its target of drafting 5,000 new recruits per intake batch. Graduation ceremony for Intake No. 17 recruits at the Yangon Regional Command training centre on December 29, 2025 According to the MDSI report, troop strength at infantry battalion bases throughout the country nearly doubled as the military added over 70,000 new recruits. Most of the fresh recruits manning these bases—estimated to be between 60 and 80 percent—were conscripts. Resistance forces in Sagaing, Magway, Chin, and Tanintharyi regions said the troop columns moving through those areas usually contained only a few career soldiers and estimated that most of the soldiers deployed to the front lines were conscripts. “If there are 10 soldiers in a section, only about three or four are old soldiers. About 70 percent are new conscripts," said Salai Ro Chin, spokesperson for the Chinland Defence Forces (CDF)-Asho, which operates in Magway Region where most of the military’s armaments factories are located. CDF-Asho is also one of the fighting forces most directly affected by the military’s increased manpower, as it is currently engaged in clashes near the military’s Nat Yay Kan base on the Ann-Padan road, an important route for controlling access between Magway region and Rakhine State. The military has deployed many of its available reinforcements to that front. Having negotiated ceasefires with the ethnic armed groups in northern Shan State—whom the Chinese government had pressured into laying down their arms—the Myanmar military also regained control of Lashio and Mongmit (Momeik) in northern Shan State and Mogok in Mandalay Region, and has come close to capturing the rest of northern Mandalay Region in a counteroffensive against the resistance. “Regarding the visible reversals in the war in 2025, conscription was a major factor. The military council was able to implement it successfully, broadly, and effectively as they intended,” said MDSI’s head of military research, Naung Yoe. “They were able to prepare well and utilise it for the shift in the military situation that they desired.” The risk of escape Having been detained and forced into military service, Kyaw Aung and Myint were sent to attend a two-and-a-half-month training at Military Advanced Training Depot No. 1 in Gyobingauk village in Yangon Region’s Taikkyi Township. While they were initially eager to escape at the first opportunity during training, both said they fully realised the danger they were facing when they saw two new trainees shot and arrested while trying to flee. They completed the training and were sent to the Light Infantry Battalion (LIB) 313 base in Hmawbi Township, where their daily routines gave them somewhat more freedom. Kyaw Aung seized the chance to escape with the group of friends during guard duty one night, even managing to exit the battalion’s compound, but the group was caught and brought back the next morning. “Since it wasn’t light yet and we couldn’t see the roads, we went into a small Buddhist monastery to sleep. When morning came, a monk said, ‘Don’t know the way, men? I’ll show you,’ and sent us straight onto the road leading back to the battalion base,” Kyaw Aung recalled. “We didn't dare ask anyone for directions either. We were afraid of being caught again. We hired motorcycle taxis and went along the road the monk had directed us to. We had barely reached it when we ran into people from the unit. They handcuffed us immediately and took us away.” He was imprisoned for over a month and a half for the escape attempt. Upon his release, he was sent along with a group of 45 training graduates to Monywa, Sagaing Region. Although the junta controls Monywa, the region’s capital, resistance forces remain strong in the surrounding township. The military then assigned Kyaw Aung to a village called Kyauk Myet in nearby Salingyi Township to provide security for freight trucks carrying copper from the Chinese-backed Wanbao mining project and transporting fuel back to the project site. Kyaw Aung, along with his comrades, started planning their escape again while in Salingyi Township, ultimately joining a group of his comrades who took two firearms and fled, intending to find the nearest NUG-commanded People’s Defence Organisation. A group of six conscripts, including Kyaw Aung, turned themselves over to the Salingyi Township People’s Defence Organisation (Photo - Yinmarbin District PDO) “I ran, determined to get the weapon,” Kyaw Aung recalled from the night he escaped. “I was already thinking that even if they caught me, I would fire at them and die in the shootout.” “I couldn't bear the thought of falling back into their hands,” he continued. “If I did, I would just die anyway. Let them chase me and try as hard as they can to catch me, I thought. I’ll shoot back as long as I have bullets. I even got a hand grenade to take with me.” Among the six men Kyaw Aung escaped with, most have taken up arms again and are now fighting on the resistance side. “I will work until the revolution is finished,” Kyaw Aung said. “When the time comes and the revolution is over, that’s when I want to go home.” The junta’s carrots and sticks The military regime began introducing new measures last year to prevent young people from escaping conscription. Initially going so far as to restrict phone usage for new recruits, the junta began to relax the rules around the time they were gathering men for Intake No. 14, permitting some movement as well as the use of cell phones even at the front. As the military loosened its controls on new recruits, resistance forces and other observers noted a downward trend in the conscripts’ escape attempts. People’s Goal, a civil society organisation assisting defectors from the military, collected data showing that the number of defections—totalling 2,578 between January and December 2025—tapered over the course of the year. “Since it's a period where our momentum is down on the battlefield, instead of fleeing and getting caught, we hear there are many who stay in the army with the intention of just going home once their term of service is fulfilled,” said Min Kyaw, who serves on the central committee of the People Independence Organisation/People Independence Army (PIO/PIA) resistance force. He contended that the NUG had to do more to counter the military’s recruitment and conscription efforts. “The most important thing is the need to pressure the junta by military means,” he said. “Since they are people who were forcibly portered and did not join because they wanted to fight, I think when military pressure falls on them, they will flee en masse.” Graduation ceremony for the Intake No. 18 batch in Kwinkauk, a town in Ayeyarwady Region’s Ingapu Township, in the last week of January. Potentially undermining the incentive for conscripts to serve out their required two years as soldiers, the military’s conscription law includes a “mobilisation” provision that, depending on the need for manpower, allows the regime to recall soldiers who have already served. So far, however, the military’s more relaxed treatment of recruits seems to have succeeded in convincing many of them to complete their service periods without resistance. Resistance fighters have also admitted that they underestimated the new recruits’ combat capability, which they originally hoped would counterbalance the military’s advantages in firepower. The conscripts have also become more formidable with experience, they said. “People have used phrases like 'there’s quantity but no quality’ to denigrate them,” Salai Ro Chin said. “In reality, that scorn is not 100 percent correct and we have to say those assessments have become wrong. Because they have been building up their numbers systematically, and if someone survives in this environment for long, we start to see them win.” “What is instilled during the training period has also persuaded them not to view the junta negatively," he went on. “The parts where revolutionary forces are losing territory now, the parts where we were on the offensive and are now fighting to hold territory—we need to face that these are how the army has benefitted from their conscription law.” MDSI’s November report suggested ways that the NUG could continue encouraging defections to counteract the advantages the military has regained from conscription. However, Naung Yoe, the defector heading MDSI, pointed to the overall weakness of the NUG’s preparation for and response to conscription as a reason for the military’s return to dominance through most of the country. “When there is no good and correct strategic response, and when major disruptions cannot be made, they can recruit according to their objectives. They can train and prepare. They can successfully transport and deploy these same young people to frontline battlefields. They are launching counteroffensives against revolutionary forces using this new manpower,” Naung Yoe remarked. (Personal names used in this article have been changed for security reasons.) Graduation ceremony for Intake No. 17, held at the Yangon Regional Command

Two years later, an assessment of what the junta has gained through conscription

With the military recovering ground after historic losses to anti-junta forces, resistance fighters and analysts are assessing how the conscription policy succeeded even as hundreds of new conscripts courageously escaped and defected

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