discussed below) generated personal and institutional revenue as well as providing strategic advantages. Tatmadaw and its linked companies and enterprises occupied large tracts of land, particularly those close to roads from which extraction and transportation were more efficient but which were also strategically important for military movements. . . . Often, however, the military units occupied far more land than they officially required for their airfields or military bases, often multiple times that amount. They compensated local people from whom they seized the land poorly and sometimes not at all, selling extra land to other Myanmar businesses or Chinese companies. (Felbab-Brown, 2017, p. 11) By maintaining such a strong physical presence, the military kept pressure on the ethnic populations to comply with military demands and suppress rebellion. Furthermore, remaining in the region also allowed the Tatmadaw to continue closely monitoring operations to ensure it would reap the benefits of various resource economies in the region. The fact that the Tatmadaw also sold land to other state-owned and militarylinked companies further supports the argument that the top concerns of military and top generals has always been their economic success and longevity. Furthermore, despite the 2016 NLD government, illegal logging and trading continued to undermine the intent of new government reform policies and decreased economic incentives for peace agreements in the region (Felbab-Brown, 2017). This could not have happened without the explicit consent of military units in the area. Individual military commanders benefited directly by allowing the collection of taxes in exchange for allowing loggers and traders to continue their activities unabated. After growing international criticism regarding the destruction of Burma’s forests, Burma and China struck a new trade deal that banned export of unprocessed logs from Burma, unless through Yangon and under the auspices of the state-run MTE... The Myanmar government also imposed an additional timber export ban... These policies also 51