Over the past months Sudan’s battlefield has shifted from an early war of contested urban advances to one in which the Sudanese Armed Forces are increasingly leveraging airpower to reshape operational realities on the ground. Renewed SAF air operations, including resupply airdrops and targeted strikes across Kordofan and Darfur, have given army formations the breathing space to hold and in some places recover key terrain while RSF massed ground offensives have lost pace.
The most visible manifestation of this change is the SAF’s return to deliberate air logistics and strike missions after a lull earlier in 2025. Reported airdrops to isolated garrisons in places such as Babanusa and a noted revival of aviation activity across Darfur and Kordofan indicate the army has prioritized air mobility to blunt sieges and sustain forward units. These operations have not only improved SAF tactical endurance but have complicated RSF attempts to convert local pressure into a broader operational breakthrough.
That shift helps explain why RSF ground momentum has at times stalled. The army’s Jan 2025 counteroffensives, culminating in the recapture of the strategic city of Wad Madani, exposed RSF vulnerabilities on supply, force generation, and holding capacity. Analysts and reporting from the period describe RSF pullbacks in some sectors as the result of combat exhaustion, logistical strain, and the degrading effect of sustained aerial interdiction. Tactical setbacks have limited the RSF’s ability to sustain the kind of continuous, deep maneuvers that characterized earlier phases of the conflict.
These battlefield trends are not uniform or permanent. The RSF has continued to seize strategic economic assets where it retained initiative, most notably reported operations around the Heglig oilfield in early December 2025, demonstrating that control of resources and local initiative can still deliver important gains even as large scale offensives slow. The fighting therefore looks less like a single decisive swing and more like a fragmentation of frontlines where momentum shifts by sector.
The SAF’s tactical air advantage, however, has strategic limits. Sudanese forces retain older generation combat aircraft and a constrained logistics base. That has led senior military planners to pursue higher end acquisitions to consolidate air superiority and extend operational reach. Public reporting of revived procurement efforts suggests Khartoum sees advanced fighters and expanded aviation capacity as necessary to convert tactical air success into durable operational advantage. But procurement and sustainment present political and fiscal challenges, and new platforms alone cannot substitute for logistics, maintenance, and trained crews.
The wider implications are threefold. First, airpower has proven decisive at the operational margin by sustaining dispersed SAF units and blunt ing RSF massed assaults. Second, the conflict is likely to remain spatially fragmented: localized RSF gains and economic strikes will coexist alongside SAF-controlled corridors that depend on air resupply. Third, external dynamics will matter more than ever. Arms flows, regional diplomacy, and contestation over Sudanese resources will shape whether SAF’s air advantage can be translated into a political settlement rather than a protracted stalemate. International litigation and accusations of external support for RSF operations illustrate how the battlefield and diplomatic tracks are intertwined.
For policymakers the lesson is straightforward. Tactical air superiority can reset battlefield calculations but it does not, by itself, create governance capacity or a stable peace. If SAF is to convert recent air-enabled gains into a durable outcome it will need to secure logistics, protect lines of communication, and engage a diplomatic strategy that reduces incentives for outside patronage of irregular forces. Absent those steps the war risks devolving into a long, segmented conflict in which periodic RSF offensives, resource grabs, and humanitarian catastrophe continue to exact a heavy toll on civilians and the region.