The Sri Lanka Army is the oldest and largest of the Sri Lanka Armed Forces and is responsible for land-based military and humanitarian operations. Established as the Ceylon Army in 1949, it was renamed when Sri Lanka became a republic in 1972. As of the year 2010, the Army has believed to have approximately 200,000 regular personnel, approximately between 20,000–40,000 reserve personnel and 18,000 National Guardsmen and comprises 13 operational divisions, one air-mobile brigade, one commando brigade, one special forces brigade, one independent armored brigade, three mechanized infantry brigades and over 40 infantry brigades. From the 1980s to 2009 the army was engaged in the Sri Lankan civil war.
The professional head of the Sri Lanka Army is the Commander of the Army, currently Lieutenant General Jagath Jayasuriya. The Commander-in-Chief of the Sri Lankan Military is the President of the country, who heads the National Security Council through the Ministry of Defense, which is the highest level of military command charged with formulating, executing defence policy and procurements for the armed forces. However operations of the Sri Lanka Army are coordinated by the Joint Operations Command, with other two armed forces.
Read more about Sri Lanka Army: Current Deployments, Organization Structure, Training, Personnel, Equipment, See Also, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the word army:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)