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The Sri Lanka Armed Forces is the overall unified military of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka encompassing the Sri Lanka Army, the Sri Lanka Navy, and the Sri Lanka Air Force; they are governed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The three services have around 161,000 active personnel; conscription has never been imposed in Sri Lanka. ==History== Sri Lanka has a long military history going back to more than 2000 years. The roots of the modern Sri Lankan military lead back to the colonial era when the Portuguese, Dutch and British established local militias to support their wars against the local Kingdoms. The British created the Ceylon Rifle Regiment during the Kandyan wars, although it had natives in its ranks majority of it was made up of Malays. It was disbanded 1873. The lineage of the Sri Lanka Armed Forces dates back to 1881, when the British created a volunteer reserve on the island named the Ceylon Light Infantry Volunteers. Created to supplement the British garrison in Ceylon in the event of an external threat, it gradually increased in size. In 1910 it was renamed the Ceylon Defence Force (CDF) and consisted of several regiments. The CDF mobilized for home defence in World War I and again in World War II when its units were deployed along with allied forces in Asia and Africa. At the end of the war it has grown in size to that of an independent brigade, but was de-mobilized in 1946 and disbanded in 1949. In 1937 the ''Ceylon Naval Volunteer Force'' was established (later renamed as the Ceylon Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (CRNVR)), it was mobilized for war in 1939 and was incorporated into the Royal Navy. Following establishment of the Dominion of Ceylon with Britain granting independence in 1948, work began to establish a regular military. The Army Act No. 17 of 1949 was passed by Parliament on April 11, 1949 and formalized in the Gazette Extraordinary No. 10028 of October 10, 1949. This marked the creation of the Ceylon Army, and the CDF the CRNVR were disbanded to make way for a regular navy. On December 9, 1950 the Royal Ceylon Navy (RCyN) was established. Finally in 1951 the Royal Ceylon Air Force (RCyAF) was established as the youngest of the three forces. From the out set Britain played a significant role in helping the Ceylon government in developing its armed forces. The growth for the Ceylon Armed Forces were slow due to lack of foreign threat, since Ceylon maintained cordial relations with its neighbor India and had a defence treaty with Britain. In the 1950s it was mainly employed in internal security assisting the police. There was an attempted coup in 1962 by a group of reservists, which led to cuts in military spending and the disbandment of several regiments. This together with the lack of an intelligence agency left it ill-prepared for the insurgency launched by the marxist JVP in April 1971. (詳細は1971 JVP Insurrection saw Ceylon Armed Forces mobilizing for combat operations for the first time and its size grew rapidly. The insurrection was brought under control in a few months. In 1972 Ceylon became a Republic and the Ceylon Armed Forces became the Sri Lanka Armed Forces. (詳細はTamil militant groups in the north of the island. This was the beginning of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The size of the Armed Forces grew at a rapid rate in the 1980s. By the mid-1980s, the Armed Forces began launching operations in the like of conventional warfare against the LTTE which had by then became the most powerful of the Tamil militant groups. This led to India intervening by breaching Sri Lankan air space to carry out food drops and shortly afterward the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord was signed and the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) was sent to Sri Lanka to establish peace. (詳細はLTTE and the IPKF leading to open war with the two suffering heavy casualties. In 1990 the IPKF pulled out and the war commenced with the Sri Lanka Armed Forces and the LTTE. In 1994, a brief ceasefire came into place and peace talks began. But it broke down when the LTTE attacked several docked naval gunboats. The phase of the war that followed, known as Eelam War III, saw a conventional war taking place in the northern and eastern provinces of the island and terrorist attacks in other parts of the country. The Sri Lankan Army began deploying full divisions in offensive operations and the Navy and Air Force increased their inventories to support the Army. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sri Lanka Armed Forces」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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