Mallika Dureja
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Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Defense has said that the country will cut its military by a lot as it tries to save money during its worst economic crisis in decades.
The state minister of defence said on Friday that the bankrupt country will cut its army by a third to 135,000 people by next year and to 100,000 people by 2030. This is part of the government’s plan to fix its finances.
Sri Lanka will slash its army by a third to 135,000 by next year and to 100,000 by 2030, the defence minister said on Friday, as the country facing its worst economic crisis in more than seven decades tries to cut costs.
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Premitha Bandara Thennakoon said in a statement, “Military spending is mostly paid for by the government, and it indirectly stimulates and opens up ways for economic growth by ensuring national and human security.”
Thennakoon said that the goal of the move is to make a defence force that is “technically and tactically sound and well-balanced” by 2030.
The island country of 22 million people has been struggling for months because of shortages of food and fuel and rising prices. After the country went into a deep economic crisis last year when its foreign exchange reserves ran out, the government cut spending.
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After the government stopped paying its debts, President Ranil Wickremesinghe raised taxes and cut spending by a lot. He did this to make it easier for the International Monetary Fund to agree to bail out the country. The World Bank says that Sri Lanka’s armed forces were at their largest between 2017 and 2019, when there were 317,000.
That was more than a decade after the country’s civil war with the separatist Tamil Tigers, which lasted for 25 years and ended in 2009.
Verite Research, a think tank in Colombo, says that the defence sector’s share of Sri Lanka’s total spending peaked in 2021 at 2.3% of its gross domestic product, but has since dropped to 2%. Last year, almost 10% of public spending went to defence, and analysts say that half of the government’s salary bill goes to pay for security force members.
Sri Lanka said this week that it barely had enough money to pay its government workers and pensioners. Last year, the economy shrank by about 8.7% because people had to deal with long blackouts, long lines for gas, empty supermarket shelves, and inflation that was out of control.
In July, angry protesters stormed the official residence of the president at the time, Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He briefly left the country and gave his resignation while he was away.
