Military ranks of Myanmar explained

The Military ranks of Myanmar are the military insignia used by the Myanmar Armed Forces, its auxiliary services, some government departments and some civilian organizations.

All the government employees are called "civil service personnel" (Burmese: နိုင်ငံ့ဝန်ထမ်း|nuiṅʻ ṅaṃ vanʻthamʻʺ|lit=State's employee). Their ranks and appointments are grouped into two categories:

1. Officer or gazetted officer,^[1] whose promotion and posting are recorded in the Gazette of Myanmar.^[2]
2. Staff or Other Ranks ranks below the gazetted officers.^[1]

Personnels of the Armed Forces and the Police Force are included in the civil service personnels but the rules of civil service personnels are not applied to them because of the special nature of their duties.^[3]

The rank insignia of Myanmar Armed Forces is the basic form for all other rank insignia in Myanmar.

• Some departments/organizations use the same insignia as that of the Armed Forces but with different colour, (example: rank insignia of Myanmar Police Force use silver stars instead of golden ones).^[4]
• Some use the same style as that of the Armed Forces but with organization's symbol in place of military stars (example: rank insignia of Myanmar Red Cross Society use red crosses in place of rank stars).
• Those departments that don't use the military-like uniform system, use the pin badges with rank insignia (example: rank insignia of General Administration Department).^[5]

Myanmar Armed Forces

All three branches of Myanmar Armed Forces use the same rank system and insignia. While the titles are the same across all branches in Burmese, English translations are different depending on the branch.

Officers

In Myanmar Armed Forces, the officer cadets who have graduated from Defense Services Academies (DSA, DSMA, DSTA, etc.) and Officer Training Schools (OTS) are directly commissioned as gazetted officers with the rank of Second Lieutenant or Sub-lieutenant.^[6]

Special insignia of general/flag officers

In addition the general/flag officers have additional special insignia.

Other ranks

In Myanmar Armed Forces, Lance corporals and Corporals are commonly referred to as Burmese: Saya by both enlisted staffs and officers. Warrant officers (Class 1 and Class 2) are referred to as Burmese: Bo Lay, Sergeant and Staff Sergeant are referred to as Burmese: Saya Gyi. These unofficial ranks are in used throughout the daily life of all branches of Myanmar Armed Forces. Insignia-wearing OR within the Myanmar Armed Forces are usually seasoned veteran soldiers with wide-ranging experience of the battlefield, thus both officers and enlisted men refer to them as "teacher" out of respect as well as affection.

Rank group	Other Ranks (Insignia Wearing)						Other Ranks (No Insignia)
Burmese^[19]	Burmese: အရာခံဗိုလ်	Burmese: ဒုတိယအရာခံဗိုလ်/ဒုအရာခံဗိုလ်	Burmese: တပ်ခွဲတပ်ကြပ်ကြီး/<br />အုပ်ခွဲတပ်ကြပ်ကြီး	Burmese: တပ်ကြပ်ကြီး/<br />တပ်ကြပ်ကြီး (စာရေး)	Burmese: တပ်ကြပ်	Burmese: ဒုတိယတပ်ကြပ်/ဒုတပ်ကြပ်	Burmese: တပ်သား	Burmese: တပ်သားသစ်
ALA-LC	Burmese: 'araākhaṃ bauilaʻ	Burmese: dautaiya 'araākhaṃ bauilaʻ	Burmese: tapaʻ khavai tapaʻ karpaʻ karīʺ/<br />aupaʻ khavai tapaʻ karpaʻ karīʺ	Burmese: tapaʻ karpaʻ karīʺ/<br />tapaʻ karpaʻ karīʺ caā raeʺ	Burmese: tapaʻ karpaʻ	Burmese: dautai yatapaʻ karpaʻ	Burmese: tapaʻ saāʺ	Burmese: tapaʻ saāʺ
Myanmar Armed Forces							No insignia	No insignia
Army translation^[20]	Warrant officer class 1	Warrant officer class 2	Staff Sergeant (aka Company Quartermaster Sergeant)	Sergeant/ Sergeant (Clerk)	Corporal	Lance corporal	Private	Recruit
Navy translation	Warrant officer class 1	Warrant officer class 2	Chief petty officer	Petty officer/ Petty Officer (clerk)	Leading seaman	Acting leading	Able-body	Recruit
Air force translation	Warrant officer class 1	Warrant officer class 2	Flight sergeant	Sergeant/ Sergeant (clerk)	Corporal	Lance corporal	Private	Recruit

Myanmar Police Force

Myanmar Police Force is an independent department of the Ministry of Home Affairs, one of the ministries under administration of Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services. The rank insignia of Myanmar Police Force are the insignia of Myanmar Armed Forces with different colours and with different titles.

Officers

In the Myanmar Police Force, a person of the rank of Police second lieutenant and above is called an officer; while an officer of the rank of Police Captain and above is called a gazetted officer.^[21]

Burmese	Burmese: ရဲဗိုလ်ချုပ်ကြီး				Burmese: ဒုတိယရဲဗိုလ်ချုပ်ကြီး		Burmese: ရဲဗိုလ်ချုပ်		Burmese: ရဲမှူးချုပ်		Burmese: ရဲမှူးကြီး		Burmese: ဒုတိယရဲမှူးကြီး		Burmese: ရဲမှူး		Burmese: ဒုတိယရဲမှူး		Burmese: ရဲအုပ်			Burmese: ဒုတိယရဲအုပ်			Burmese: ဒုတိယရဲအုပ်လောင်း
ALA-LC	Burmese: raaibauilaʻ khayupaʻ krīʺ				Burmese: dautaiya raaibauilaʻ khayupaʻ krīʺ		Burmese: raaibauilaʻ khayupaʻ		Burmese: raaimahūʺ khayupaʻ		Burmese: raaimahūʺ karī		Burmese: dautaiya raaimahūʺ karī		Burmese: raaimahūʺ		Burmese: dautaiya raaimahūʺ		Burmese: raai 'aupaʻ			Burmese: dautaiya raai 'aupaʻ			Burmese: dautaiya raai 'aupaʻ laoṅaʻʺ
Myanmar Police Force
Translation	Police general				Police lieutenant general		Police major general		Police brigadier general		Police colonel		Police lieutenant colonel		Police major		Police captain		Police lieutenant			Police second lieutenant			Police officer cadet

Other ranks

Rank group	Insignia-wearing staffs				Enlisted staffs
Burmese	Burmese: ရဲအရာခံဗိုလ်	Burmese: ရဲတပ်ကြပ်ကြီး	Burmese: ရဲတပ်ကြပ်	Burmese: ဒုတိယရဲတပ်ကြပ်	Burmese: ရဲတပ်သား	Burmese: ရဲတပ်သားသစ်
ALA-LC	Burmese: Raai 'araā khaṃ bauilaʻ	Burmese: Raai tapaʻ karpaʻ krīʺ	Burmese: Raai tapaʻ karpaʻ	Burmese: Dautaiya raai tapaʻ karpaʻ	Burmese: Raai tapaʻ saāʺ	Burmese: Raai tapaʻ saāʺ sacaʻ
Myanmar Police Force					No insignia	No insignia
Translation	Police warrant officer	Police sergeant	Police corporal	Police lance corporal	Police private	Police recruit

Prisons Department

Prisons Department is a department of the Ministry of Home Affairs, one of the ministries under administration of Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services. The rank insignia of its officers are the same as that of Myanmar Police Force but with different titles.

Officers

	Burmese: ညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူးချုပ်				Burmese: ဒုတိယညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူးချုပ်		Burmese: ညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူး		Burmese: ဒုတိယညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူး		Burmese: လက်ထောက်ညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူး		Burmese: ဦးစီးအရာရှိ (ပထမတန်း)		Burmese: ဦးစီးအရာရှိ (ဒုတိယတန်း)		Burmese: ဦးစီးအရာရှိ (တတိယတန်း)		Burmese: ထောင်မှူးကြီး/<br />ဒုတိယကြီးကြပ်ရေးမှူး			Burmese: ထောင်မှူး/<br />လက်ထောက်ကြီးကြပ်ရေးမှူး
ALA-LC
Full insignia
Translation	Director general				Deputy director general		Director		Deputy director		Assistant director		Staff officer (first class)		Staff officer (second class)		Staff officer (third class)		Chief jailor/ Deputy supervisor			Jailor/ Assistant supervisor

Other ranks

Rank group	Insignia-wearing staffs					Enlisted staffs
	Burmese: လက်ထောက်ထောင်မှူး(၂)/<br />လက်ထောက်ကြီးကြပ်ရေးမှူး	Burmese: လက်ထောက်ထောင်မှူး(၁)/<br />ဒုတိယလက်ထောက်ကြီးကြပ်ရေးမှူး	Burmese: အကျဉ်းထောင်တပ်ကြပ်ကြီး	Burmese: အကျဉ်းထောင်တပ်ကြပ်	Burmese: အကျဉ်းထောင်ဒုတိယတပ်ကြပ်	Burmese: အကျဉ်းထောင်တပ်သား	Burmese: အကျဉ်းထောင်တပ်သားသစ်
ALA-LC
						No insignia	No insignia
Translation	Assistant jailor (2)/ Assistant supervisor	Assistant jailor (1)/ Deputy assistant supervisor	Prison sergeant	Prison corporal	Prison lance corporal	Prison private	Prison recruit

General Administration Department

General Administration Department is a department of the Ministry of Home Affairs, one of the ministries under administration of Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services. As its uniform is not the military style, pin badges are used to show ranks.^[22]

Officers

Rank group
Burmese	Burmese: ညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူးချုပ်/<br />အမြဲတမ်းအတွင်းဝန်	Burmese: ဒုတိယညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူးချုပ်/<br />တိုင်းအုပ်ချုပ်ရေးမှူး	Burmese: ညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူး/<br />ခရိုင်အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးမှူး	Burmese: ဒုတိယညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူး/<br />ဒုတိယခရိုင်အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးမှူး	Burmese: လက်ထောက်ညွှန်ကြားရေးမှူး/<br />မြို့နယ်အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးမှူး	Burmese: ဦးစီးအရာရှိ/<br />ဒုတိယမြို့နယ်အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးမှူး	Burmese: ဒုတိယဦးစီးမှူး/<br />စီမံ ၁
ALA-LC
Rank symbol
Pin badge^[23]
Translation	Director general/ Permanent secretary	Deputy director general/ Divisional administrator	Director/ District administrator	Deputy director/ Deputy district administrator	Assistant director/ Township administrator	Staff officer/ Deputy township administrator	Deputy chief officer/ Manager (1)

Staffs

Rank group	Staffs
Burmese	Burmese: ရုံးအုပ်	Burmese: ဌာနခွဲစာရေး	Burmese: အကြီးတန်းစာရေး	Burmese: အငယ်တန်းစာရေး	Burmese: ရုံးအကူ/<br />စာပို့/<br />ယာဉ်မောင်း
ALA-LC
Rank symbol
Pin badge
Translation	Superintendent	Branch clerk	Upper divisional clerk	Lower divisional clerk	Office factotum/ Mailman/ Driver

Notes and References

1. rules . 2 . 81/2020 . Union Civil Service Board of Myanmar . The Union Civil Service Board Rules . 1 . 11 September 2020. "(a) Officer means the service personnel at the ranks of the gazetted officer and above; (b) Staff means the service personnel at the ranks below the gazetted officer"
2. Book: Crouch, Melissa. Tim Lindsey. Law, Society and Transition in Myanmar. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2014. 9781782254768.
3. rules . 9 June 2017 . 2 . Union Civil Service Board . The Rules Amending the Civil Service Personnel Rules . 1 . en . ...Although the Defence Service Personnel and members of the Myanmar Police Force are the Civi Service Personnel, these rules shall not apply to them according to the nature of their works and duties..
4. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/myanmar-police-chief-warns-reporters-not-to-trust-leaked-document-about-lawyers-death-02012017141430.html/myanmar-police-chief-zaw-win-feb1-2017.jpg/@@images/61f9e976-de9f-4bca-81bb-df00b4d4ee8b.jpeg Myanmar police chief Major General Zaw Win cautions reporters in Naypyidaw to accept only information that the police confirm about the killing of prominent rights attorney Ko Ni, Feb. 1, 2016. / RFA /
5. https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/tzhgad_office10.jpg The badge of a civil servant working at the Eastern Yangon General Administration Department office in Thingangyun Township. (Teza Hlaing / Frontier)
6. news from "cincds.gov.mm" (Office of the Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services), for example: https://cincds.gov.mm/node/5601, https://cincds.gov.mm/node/5742?d=1, https://cincds.gov.mm/node/15693?d=2, https://cincds.gov.mm/node/11790, etc.
7. Web site: my:တပ်မတော် ရာထူးအဆင့်အတန်း အင်္ဂလိပ်လိုအခေါ်အဝေါ်များ . Tatmadaw appointment ranks' nomenclature in English . my, en . https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=461530361337155&id=193717571451770&m_entstream_source=timeline&ref=opera_speed_dial . KoKo LinnMaung . Facebook . 23 July 2019.
8. Web site: American Library Association . Burmese . loc.gov . Library of Congress . 16 April 2022.
9. Book: Cooke . Melinda W. . Bunge . Frederica M. . Burma: a country study . Area Handbook . 1983 . Library of Congress . Washington, D.C. . 83-25871 . 256 . 3rd . limited . 7 July 2024 . National Security.
10. https://cincds.gov.mm/node/9399?d=2 Fleet Exercise-2020 conducted with involvement of attack submarine Minye Theinkhathu of Tatmadaw (Navy) to enhance defence prowess of State
11. https://cdn-japantimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/np_file_111053.jpeg Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing receives a model plane from Gen. Maung Maung Kyaw in 2019.
12. Web site: Message of Greetings from Commander in Chief of Defence Services Senior General Min Aung Hlaing on the occasion of the 75th Anniversary Diamond Jubilee of Armed Forces Day on 27 March 2020. . Myanmar Digital News.
13. Web site: File image of Myanmar Army's deputy commander-in-chief, Vice Senior General Soe Win . Flickr.
14. Web site: Myanmar New Appointed Home Affair Minister. . Aung Shine Oo.
15. Web site: Lt-Gen Min Naung who will continue to participate in the peace process. . Thiha Lwin . The Irrawaddy.
16. Web site: Lt-Gen Thet Pon (left) and Maj-Gen Nyunt Win Swe (right). . Htet Naing Zaw . The Irrawaddy. July 2020 .
17. Web site: Myanmar's Army Chief General Min Aung Hlaing 2nd-r waves as he leaves a ceremony to mark the 67th anniversary of Armed Forces Day in Myanmar's Capital Naypyitaw . March 27, 2012 . Soe Zeya Tun . Reuters.
18. Web site: Parade of the 76th Anniversary Armed Forces Day held;Chairman of the State Administration Council Commanderin-Chief of Defence Services Senior General Maha Thray Sithu Min Aung Hlaing delivers address . seniorgeneralminaunghlaing.com.mm. 28 March 2021 .
19. Web site: my:တပ်မတော်(ကြည်း၊ ရေ၊ လေ)အဆင့်လိုက် လစာနှုန်းထားများ . my . Salaries according to ranks in Tatmadaw (Army, Navy, Air Force) . http://www.mmrecruitment.gov.mm/node/57 . Myanmar Military Recruitment.
20. Book: my:မြန်မာ–အင်္ဂလိပ် အဘိဓာန် . Myanmar English Dictionary . . 2019 . Myanmar Language Commission, Department of Myanmar National Languages, Ministry of Education.
21. law . The Myanmar Police Force Maintenance of Discipline Law . 26 April 1995 . 3. (e) and (f) . State Law and Order Restoration Council . en.
22. https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/tzhgad_office7.jpg A civil servant stands outside the Eastern Yangon General Administration Department office in Thingangyun Township. (Teza Hlaing / Frontier)
23. https://z-p3-scontent-sin6-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.18169-9/19029334_1547786551921527_6568787389276441282_n.jpg?stp=cp0_dst-jpg_e15_fr_q65&_nc_cat=108&ccb=1-5&_nc_sid=2d5d41&efg=eyJpIjoidCJ9&_nc_eui2=AeEeEgA-G5hB5_n0ElLQLIIY8wdPGomGS5LzB08aiYZLkhmSNlBg61BpuQQCPhlrX9Zpsf1yB35j8g3K7s1rzFbN&_nc_ohc=gbT1M-Zav1wAX_o8KWb&_nc_ht=z-p3-scontent-sin6-2.xx&oh=00_AT95ojGxTFqQDObYbZnr7Y1A5yqRiFvw9XG3ggQeJtHdQQ&oe=62851266 ပြည်ထဲရေးဝန်ကြီးဌာန၊ အထွေထွေအုပ်ချုပ်ရေးဦးစီးဌာန၏ ဝန်ထမ်းအဆင့်အလိုက်သတ်မှတ်ထားသော ရင်ထိုးတံဆိပ်သင်္ကေတများ / photo- myo kyaw kyaw