Sri Lanka will aim to have a military numbering at 150,000 said a state minister last week, as he rebuffed calls for further demilitarisation and stressed there would be “no impact on national security”.
Earlier this month, a Sri Lankan lawmaker admitted that the island is one of the most militarised places in the world, stating that there were 1.5 soldiers for every 100 citizens.
Tamil parliamentarian Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam however clarified that this was vastly concentrated in the Tamil North-East, stating that “out of the 20 divisions of Sri Lanka’s military, you have 16 based in the North and East, of which 14 are based specifically in the North”.
State Defence Minister Minister Premitha Bandara Tennakoon said that his government would look to “right size” the military, with final numbers if 150,000 expected sometime away in 2030.
“This will be done without removing anybody from the military” Tennakoon claimed.
“While doing the right sizing of the military, we will be acquiring modern technology. We will do this gradually and carefully with no impact on national security. It will be done responsibly and in a scientific way.”
Tennakoon did not reveal how many troops are currently in Sri Lanka’s armed forces. In 2018, the World Bank estimated there were 317,000 service personnel in the country, twice the size of the UK’s regular forces.
As Ponnambalam told parliament earlier this month, most of this deployment is in the Tamil homeland. In Jaffna there is as much as one soldier for every 10 civilians and 1 soldier for every 4 civilians in the Vanni, he said.
The true figure may be higher, with a 2017 report by the Adayaalam Centre for Policy Research (ACPR) and People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL), having found that there was at least one Sri Lankan soldier for every two civilians living in the Mullaitivu.
