Bankrupt Sri Lanka will drastically reduce its military, the defense ministry said on Friday, as the government works to repair its shambolic finances after an unprecedented economic crisis.
The island nation is still reeling from months of food and fuel shortages that made daily life a misery for 22 million people last year.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe has raised taxes and imposed harsh spending cuts to trigger a much-anticipated International Monetary Fund bailout after the government defaulted on debt.
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Sri Lanka’s armed forces are next on the chopping block, with the defense ministry announcing it will retire 65,000 soldiers from its 200,000-strong army within the year.
The cuts form a large part of plans to reduce Sri Lanka’s ground forces to 100,000 by the end of the decade.
“The overall objective of the strategic blueprint is to support the defense forces technically and tactically and in a balanced way,” the ministry’s statement said.
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Sri Lanka’s armed forces remain bloated more than a decade after the end of the country’s traumatic ethnic civil war.
Nearly 400,000 men served in the military at its peak strength in 2009, the year government forces crushed the Tamil Tiger separatist movement in unprovoked attacks that tortured thousands of civilian casualties.
Defense accounted for nearly 10 percent of public spending last year, and according to expert analysts, paying security force personnel made up half of the government’s salary bill.
Sri Lanka warned this week that it is barely making enough money to pay employees and public pensions despite a big tax hike at the start of the year.
The economy shrank by an estimated 8.7 percent last year as people grappled with long blackouts, gas queues, empty supermarket shelves and stagnant inflation.
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The crisis culminated in July when protesters angered by the crisis stormed the official residence of president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who briefly fled the country and resigned from abroad.
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