Episode #389: The Will To Fight
RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 2, 2025
Mie Mie Wynn Bird is a retired U.S. Army officer and defense strategist who conducts leadership and capacity-building workshops for members of Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement, including People’s Defense Forces (PDFs), ethnic armed organizations, and civil resistance networks. In this conversation, she draws on her decades of military experience and close observation of Myanmar’s conflict to talk about morale: what she believes is the single, most decisive factor in the country’s ongoing war.
Mie Mie Wynn Bird starts by explaining her main, operating principle: “people first, mission always.” In any military or resistance effort, the concept of “people first” means that weapons, plans, and resources amount to little without motivated, capable people to use them. So leaders must ensure their teams are trained, protected, supported, and respected, which builds a trust and loyalty that in turn strengthens performance in high-pressure situations. And “people first” is framed by “mission always”: that is, leaders must never lose sight of the ultimate objective, and ensure that their teams do not waver in pursuit of that goal. For Mie Mie, this leadership philosophy has been forged in combat and validated by history.
In this perspective, morale then becomes the “center of gravity” in a conflict. It is not simply an abstract or emotional state of mind, but a combination of purpose, trust, and confidence that sustains fighters under extreme stress. Mie Mie Wynn Bird recounts how, during the Burma campaign in World War II, the British commander, William Slim, turned “defeat into victory” (also the title of his famous memoir) by restoring the fighting spirit of his exhausted troops to battle back and ultimately defeat the Japanese. “It was not [additional] firepower,” she says, “it was the morale!”
For Mie Mie Wynn Bird, morale is built on two pillars: belief in a cause larger than oneself, and trust forged between leaders and those they lead. She gives an example of her experience during the first Gulf War. Her platoon moved more ammunition in one night than any comparable unit in that theater, not because of orders from above, but because the soldiers were confident that she had their backs. She had trained them rigorously, but more importantly, had shared their hardship and led from the front. That trust, she argues, cannot be fabricated for a crisis—it must be earned over time.
Turning to Myanmar, she laments that international analysts often underrate the importance of this very morale, focusing instead on data about territorial control or weapons counts. Yet, in her view, morale explains much of the conflict’s trajectory. On the resistance side, morale remains high; she hears again and again from fighters that “This is our last battle!”; in other words, they are fighting the good fight, and if they indeed prevail, they will never need to fight the military again. This conviction sustains them despite shortages of arms and supplies. She estimates that the military regime firmly holds just 20% of the country (with the opposition controlling around 40% and the remainder contested). This is despite the junta’s weapons and supplies advantages, and their ongoing receipt of arms, fuel, and diplomatic cover from Russia and China.
By contrast, junta morale has all but collapsed, according to Mie Mie Wynn Bird. She attributes this to several interlocking factors: a loss of ideological purpose, endemic corruption, and the leadership’s neglect of its own troops. Field units, she says, are left undersupplied, underpaid, and demoralized, their sacrifices unacknowledged. In many cases, soldiers are kept in the dark about the broader war effort and treated as expendable, leading to desertions and surrenders. She notes that soldiers are now defecting in unprecedented numbers, often bringing intelligence and operational details, as well as insight into regime weaknesses.
This erosion of the junta’s fighting spirit has been accelerated, she says, by the loose-knit but potent Burmese-language information ecosystem, which includes comedians, musicians, influencers, and ordinary citizens who produce satirical videos, biting memes, and grassroots news updates. By ridiculing the regime and exposing its contradictions, they sap its authority and keep opposition morale high. Many defectors, once silent, now speak openly on social media, creating a feedback loop of credibility, and emboldening others to follow.
Mie Mie Wynn Bird stresses that language is part of the fight, arguing that English-language media too often frames the conflict in ways that distort perceptions, like defaulting to simplistic “both-sides-do-it” platitudes. She offers a couple of examples of how the media could use language more skillfully to reflect a more informed understanding of the conflict: call the armed opposition “revolutionary forces,” not “rebels” or “insurgents”; avoid the term “civil war,” which implies a symmetrical conflict between two legitimate parties, and use “internal conflict” to better capture the reality of an illegitimate military clique fighting the people. And she calls for dropping honorifics like Tatmadaw or “General” for junta officers, who she bluntly describes as “a criminal gang.”
Beyond the battlefield, Mie Mie Wynn Bird highlights the indispensable role of Myanmar’s diaspora. Spread across the globe, they contribute in ways both overt and less visible: lobbying foreign governments, providing technical assistance, and raising funds to keep the resistance supplied. She tells the story of an 82-year-old woman in Queens who cooks and sells Burmese food every weekend, donating all proceeds to People’s Defense Forces. For Mie Mie Wynn Bird, this exemplifies the long-term, intergenerational commitment that will be necessary to sustain the struggle. “She’s an American citizen now,” she says. “She’s too old to travel. She will never benefit from the Burma independence, the democracy that will arrive! But to her, she said, that’s the inheritance she wanted to give back.”
Another shift she observes is the rising participation of women. Compared to earlier uprisings, women are now more present in logistics, communications, medical work, and even in combat. However, deep-seated cultural norms still limit their advancement. In many units, women are trained alongside men but then told, “No, you stay back” or relegated to rations and supply duties when the fighting starts. “There are women that really wanted to be a real soldier, and many of them left the revolution because they got frustrated,” she says. “You lost a very valuable soldier — this motivated soldier — for no reason.” Early in the conflict, women made up roughly 65% of certain resistance groups, but that number has now dropped to about 37%. Byrd calls this a “huge loss” that’s both avoidable and harmful to the cause, and she insists her training programs deliberately use mixed cohorts because diversity, including gender, strengthens problem-solving and resilience.
From a strategic standpoint, Mie Mie Wynn Bird situates Myanmar within a broader regional and global context. She calls it the “Eastern Front,” a geostrategic position that controls access between South and Southeast Asia and borders key maritime routes. “Myanmar is the last [chance for] democracy on the mainland of Southeast Asia,” she warns, and its fall would seal the region into authoritarian dominance. She says Russian involvement is not just hypothetical, but that it already has trainers, advisors, and weapons physically present in the region, and she notes how China looms large over the country, with its many economic entanglements and political influence. Myanmar’s rich trove of natural resources raises the stakes higher still, with rare earth minerals, oil and gas reserves, and an extensive coastline as assets that make the country a constant target for foreign exploitation. Control over these resources, she argues, is one of the junta’s primary motivations for holding territory, and one reason foreign powers hedge their support for the resistance.
In closing, she decries the tendency of the international community— particularly Western media— to cast Myanmar purely as a place of suffering. “The Myanmar story is not a story of victims,” she insists, but rather “a story of amazing resiliency and human ingenuity and commitment.” To her, sustaining morale isn’t just for battlefield effectiveness, it’s also about shaping the story that gets told to the outside world. In her view, winning the narrative—presenting Myanmar as a capable, determined nation rather than a perpetual victim—is itself a morale-sustaining act, and part of the struggle.