Myanmar rebels destroy Chinese-made armored vehicles with FPV drones

Fighters from a local armed group in Myanmar have destroyed several Chinese-made ZSL-92 infantry fighting vehicles belonging to the Myanmar Army using first-person-view (FPV) drones, open-source analyst Jesus Roman reported on Oct. 24, attributing the strikes to Monywa Scout, a resistance group named after Monywa, the main city of Myanmar’s Sagaing Region in the country’s northwest, though he did not say exactly how many vehicles were hit or when and where the attacks took place.

The ZSL-92, also known as the Type 92, is a Chinese six-wheeled armored vehicle that carries infantry and is armed with a 25 mm cannon in a small turret, and Roman noted that this version is seen less often in Myanmar than the WMA-301, a wheeled vehicle built on the same family of chassis and armed with a 105 mm gun, of which Myanmar’s armed forces operate about 100, according to Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi.

FPV drones are small, cheap quadcopters flown by an operator watching a live video feed through goggles or a screen, which lets them steer an explosive charge into a precise weak point on a target such as a vehicle’s roof, engine deck or open hatch, a tactic that became widespread during the war in Ukraine before spreading to other conflicts, including Myanmar’s civil war.

Myanmar’s resistance groups first used drones in combat in December 2021 in Pale township of Sagaing Region, less than a year after the military seized power in a coup, and the conflict monitor ACLED had recorded more than 2,100 drone strikes by resistance groups across more than 600 locations in the country by mid-2025, most of them carried out with commercial and agricultural drones converted to drop small explosives, although both resistance fighters and government forces have since adopted FPV drones.

Chinese-made armor has been a frequent target: in December 2023, Roman reported the destruction of a Chinese Dongfeng Mengshi armored vehicle belonging to the Myanmar Army during fighting in the north of the country, alongside BTR-3 and MT-LB armored vehicles, and earlier this year footage showed resistance fighters destroying a Myanmar Army WMA-301 that had been fitted with a metal grille, a type of improvised drone protection that also first spread during the war in Ukraine.

The drones are now reaching beyond the battlefield, as on Sept. 10 anti-junta fighters launched FPV drones at Myanmar’s Tada-U Air Base, about 35 km (22 miles) south of Mandalay, where video posted online showed one striking the nose of a Russian-made Yak-130 jet.