More than a decade after Sri Lanka’s civil war ended in 2009, the country still maintains one of the world’s largest standing armies. This enduring militarisation cannot be explained by conventional security needs or fiscal prudence. Sri Lanka is an island with no land borders and faces no significant external military threat, yet its Army remains bloated, Why? The core argument advanced here is that the Sri Lankan military’s size persists due to its embedded role in internal governance and an ethno-political project of state-building, rather than any realistic defence requirements. In the Tamil-majority northern and eastern provinces, the Army has become an instrument for controlling territory, reshaping civilian life, and entrenching a centralized Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist vision of the state. In short, the military is not merely defending Sri Lanka’s sovereignty – it is helping construct a particular kind of post-war order within Sri Lanka.

This perspective builds on, but fundamentally departs from, the critique made by analyst Daniel Alphonsus in 2021. Alphonsus’s study Sri Lanka’s Post-War Defence Budget: Overspending and Underprotection questioned why an island nation with minimal strategic threats maintains such a large army. He concluded that Colombo spends too much on defence and that resources are misallocated – for example, lavish funding of ground forces at the expense of air and naval capacity. Alphonsus proposed technocratic fixes such as downsizing the Army, increasing reserves, and reallocating budgets. While these recommendations are sensible on paper, they overlook the deeper political logic at work. The following analysis reframes Sri Lanka’s outsized military as a deliberate tool of governance and ethnic domination in the post-war era. The discussion first examines why a resurgence of armed conflict is unlikely (“No War”), then explores how the military has instead been repurposed for domestic control (“War by Other Means”). Finally, it considers why proposed downsizing has faltered and what a truly sustainable peace would require.

No War, But No Genuine Peace

It might seem intuitive that once a civil war ends, a country would scale back its armed forces. In Sri Lanka’s case, multiple indicators show that a renewed insurgency or major threat is highly improbable. Alphonsus outlines four key reasons why a large-scale Tamil rebellion is unlikely to re-emerge:

Political Disillusionment: Minority grievances remain serious and unresolved, but they no longer translate into armed rebellion. Decades of discrimination and the brutal defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have left many Tamil people with diminished expectations of change. Today’s Tamil youth did not come of age with the idealistic fervor of the 1970s; instead, they grew up in the shadow of the LTTE’s crushing defeat. There is little appetite for returning to war when the memory of 2009 looms large as a cautionary tale.

Loss of External Support: In the 1980s, Tamil militancy benefited from geopolitical currents – most notably, support from India. That era is over. India, shocked by the LTTE’s assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and keen to preserve regional stability, has firmly withdrawn its support for any separatist movement. The LTTE is a banned terrorist organization internationally, and the post-9/11 world is hostile to armed insurgencies. No foreign patron is likely to bankroll or shelter a new Tamil militant campaign.

State Military Supremacy: The balance of power has shifted decisively in the Sri Lankan state’s favor. During the early war years, Sri Lanka’s military was poorly equipped and often outmatched by a guerrilla force that innovated with superior tactics and technology. Today, Sri Lanka fields one of the largest and best-trained militaries in the region. Years of war and investment have given it robust intelligence networks, modern equipment, and bases across the island. Crucially, the Tamil population has been demilitarized and demoralized – the LTTE’s seasoned fighters are gone, and much of the Tamil middle class (once a source of leadership and resources for the rebellion) has emigrated or been silenced. Any potential militant revival would face a vastly more formidable adversary than in the past.

Unfavorable Demographics: The demographic conditions that once fueled insurgency have changed. In the 1980s, a youth bulge amid high unemployment provided ready recruits for rebel movements. By contrast, today only about a quarter of Northern Province males are in the prime 15–29 age bracket, and youth unemployment there, while above the national average, is nowhere near the explosive levels of the early 1980s. Simply put, the pool of disaffected young men available to take up arms has shrunk, and those coming of age have more economic opportunities (including private sector jobs and migration for work) than the previous generation did.

Taken together, these factors make a return to large-scale armed conflict extremely remote. Indeed, Alphonsus convincingly shows that Sri Lanka’s security environment today does not warrant a massive standing army. If strategic logic prevailed, one would expect force reduction and a shift of resources toward naval and air capabilities to address emerging non-traditional threats (such as cyber security). Yet no meaningful downsizing has occurred. This apparent paradox is the first clue that strategic logic is not the real driver of Sri Lanka’s military policy.

Equally important is what Alphonsus’s analysis misses: the adaptive resilience of Tamil nationalism in non-violent forms. It is true that the space for another violent uprising has closed, but that does not mean Tamil political aspirations have vanished. On the contrary, Tamil society has........

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