By the mid-1960s, Ne Win had found that the replacement of civilian rule by the Revolutionary Council, more thorough and penetrating than the earlier caretaker regime, had drawn both himself and the Army into a quagmire of problems. The military was unable to both fight a civil war and manage the state with equal success and its performance in the first area was steadily weakening. Moreover, the Army had become popular in the 1950s as defenders of the Union and for the administrative successes of the caretaker regime. Now that the military was permanently in charge of the government, they were held responsible for the country’s economic performance, its social ills, its ethnic problems, and a range of other issues. In other words, without a civilian government, there was no one else to blame.

The general thus began to look for ways to mobilize the civilian population in administration, or rather to give the government a civilian face, without sacrificing real power, for otherwise it would probably invite a return to the political factionalism and state fragmentation witnessed in the latter years of the Nu regime. Moreover, the stated goals of the 1962 coup, while intended to legitimate the takeover, bound Ne Win to a particular direction of reform that substantially reduced alternative options. Further constraints would emerge from increasing economic woes, for which the Council was largely responsible, and reorganization among the rebels.