How Sri Lanka Won the War

By Peter Layton-April 09, 2015

How to win a civil war in a globalized world where insurgents skillfully exploit offshore
resources? With most conflicts now being such wars, this is a question many
governments are trying to answer. Few succeed, with one major exception being Sri
Lanka where, after 25 years of civil war the government decisively defeated the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and created a peace that appears lasting. This
victory stands in stark contrast to the conflicts fought by well-funded Western forces in
Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade. How did Sri Lanka succeed against what
many considered the most innovative and dangerous insurgency force in the world?
Three main areas stand out.
First, the strategic objective needs to be appropriate to the enemy being fought. For the
first 22 years of the civil war the governments strategy was to bring the LTTE to the

negotiating table using military means. Indeed, this was the advice foreign experts
gave as the best and only option. In 2006, just before the start of the conflicts final
phase, retired Indian Lieutenant General AS Kalkat in 2006 declared, There is no
armed resolution to the conflict. The Sri Lanka Army cannot win the war against the
Lankan Tamil insurgents.
Indeed, the LTTE entered negotiations five times, but talks always collapsed, leaving a
seemingly stronger LTTE even better placed to defeat government forces. In mid2006, sensing victory was in its grasp, the LTTE deliberately ended the Norwegianbrokered ceasefire and initiated the so-called Eelam War IV. In response, the Sri
Lankan government finally decided to change its strategic objective, from negotiating
with the LTTE to annihilating it.
To succeed, a strategy needs to take into account the adversary. In this case it needed
to be relevant to the nature of the LTTE insurgency. Over the first 22 years of the civil
war, the strategies of successive Sri Lankan governments did not fulfill this criterion.
Eventually, in late 2005 a new government was elected that choose a different strategic
objective that matched the LTTEs principal weaknesses while negating their strengths.
The LTTEs principal problem was its finite manpower base. Only 12 percent of Sri
Lankas population were Lankan Tamils and of these it was believed that only some
300,000 actively supported the LTTE. Moreover, the LTTEs legitimacy as an
organization was declining. By 2006, the LTTE relied on conscription not volunteers
to fill its ranks and many of these were children. At the operational level some
seeming strengths could also be turned against the LTTE, including its rigid command
structure, a preference for fighting conventional land battles, and a deep reliance on
international support.
Grand Strategy
Second, success requires a grand strategy. A grand strategy defines the peace sought,
intelligently combines diplomacy, economics, military actions, and information
operations, and considers the development of the capabilities the nation needs to
succeed. The new government decided not to continue with the narrowly focused
military strategies that had failed its predecessors, but rather adopt a comprehensive
whole-of-nation grand strategy to guide lower-level activities.
In the economic sphere, the new government decided to allocate some 4 percent of
GDP to defense and increase the armed forces budget some 40 percent. This would
significantly strain the nations limited fiscal resources so annual grants and loans of
some $1 billion were sought from China to ease the burden. Other forms of financial
assistance, including lines of credit for oil and arms purchases, were provided by Iran,
Libya, Russia and Pakistan.
Diplomatically, the government took steps to isolate the LTTE, which received some
60 percent of its funding and most of its military equipment from offshore. This

succeeded and over time the group was banned in some 32 countries. Importantly, a
close working relationship was formed with India, the only country able to
meaningfully interfere with the new governments grand strategy. The U.S. in the post9/11 counterterrorism era also proved receptive to the governments intentions of
destroying the worlds premier suicide bomber force. America assisted by disrupting
LTTE offshore military equipment procurement, sharing intelligence, providing a
Coast Guard vessel, and supplying an important national naval command and control
system. Canada and the European Union also came on board by outlawing the LTTEs
funding networks in their countries, severely impacting the groups funding base.
Internally, the government set out to gain the active support of the public. By 2006
many Sri Lankans were war weary and doubted the new governments abilities to
achieve a victory no one else could. To win popular support the government realized
that development activities had to be continued, not stopped while the war was fought.
Moreover, various national schemes addressing poverty needed to be sustained, a
prominent example being the poor farmer fertilizer subsidy scheme. These measures
made financing the war very difficult and foreign financial support important, but were
essential to convincing the people that there was a peace worth fighting for. The
measures worked. Before 2005, the Army had difficulty recruiting 3,000 soldiers
annually; by late 2008, the Army was recruiting 3,000 soldiers a month.
The increased budgets and popular support allowed the Sri Lankan armed forces to
grow significantly. The Army in particular was expanded, growing from some 120,000
personnel in 2005 to more than 200,000 by 2009.
Astute Tactics
Third, to meet the ends that the grand strategy seeks, the focus of the lower-level,
subordinate military strategy needed to be exploiting the enemys weaknesses while
countering its strengths. The LTTE had limited numbers of soldiers, fielding only some
20,000-30,000, and with astute tactics could be overwhelmed. In this regard, the
government forces had already won a major success before Eelam War IV started in
mid-2006.
In late 2004, a senior LTTE military commander, Colonel Karuna, defected, bringing
with him some 6,000 LTTE cadres and seriously damaging the LTTEs support base in
Eastern Sri Lankan. The mass defection provided crucial intelligence that offered deep
insights into the LTTE as a fighting organization. Crucially, for the first time, the
government intelligence agencies now had Lankan Tamils willing to return to LTTEheld areas, collect information, and report back. The scale of the defection also clearly
showed that the legitimacy of the LTTE was waning.
At the start of Eelam War IV, the LTTE were able to operate throughout the country.
There were no safe rear areas as high-profile suicide attacks on the foreign minister,
defense secretary, the Pakistani high commissioner and the army chief underlined.

This capability was countered by using the enlarged armed forces and police on
internal security tasks, and by developing a Civil Defence Force of armed villagers.
Operations were also conducted to find and destroy LTTE terrorist cells operating
within the capital and some large towns. This defense-in-depth neutralized the LTTEs
well-proven ability to undertake both leadership decapitation strikes and terrorist
attacks on vulnerable civilian targets.
These defensive measures in the south and the west of the country allowed the Sri
Lankan military strategy in the north and east to be enemy-focused rather than
population-centric. The primary aim there was to attack the LTTE and force them onto
the defensive rather than try to protect the population from the LTTE the
conventional Western doctrine. The areas under LTTE control were accordingly
attacked in multiple simultaneous operations to confuse, overload, tie down and thin
out the defenders. Tactical advantage was taken of the Armys new much greater
numbers.
In these operations, small, well-trained, highly-mobile groups proved key. These
groups infiltrated behind the LTTEs front lines attacking high-value targets, providing
real-time intelligence and disrupting LTTE lines of resupply and communication.
Groups down to section level were trained and authorized to call in precision air,
artillery and mortar attacks on defending LTTE units. The combination of frontal and
in-depth assaults meant that the LTTE forces lost their freedom of maneuver, were
pinned down, and could be defeated in detail.
The small groups included Special Forces operating deep and a distinct Sri Lankan
innovation: large numbers of well-trained Special Infantry Operations Teams (SIOT)
operating closer. The considerably expanded 10,000 strong Special Forces proved
highly capable in attacking LTTE military leadership targets, removing very
experienced commanders when they were most needed and causing considerable
disruption to the inflexible hierarchical command system. Of the SIOTs, Army Chief
General Fonseka, who introduced the concept, notesthat: we also fought with fourman teams trained to operate deep in the jungle. be self-reliant and operate
independently. So a battalion had large numbers of four-man groups that allowed us to
operate from wider fronts. When Eelam War IV started there were 1500 SIOT trained
troops; by 2008 there were more than 30,000.
Learning Organization
With enhanced training in complex jungle fighting operations, Sri Lankan solders
generally became more capable, more professional, and more confident. The Army
could now undertake increasingly difficult tasks day or night while maintaining a high
tempo. The Army had became a learning organization that embraced tactical level
initiatives and innovations.
The LTTE was unique amongst global insurgency groups in also having a capable navy
that conducted two main tasks: interdiction of government coastal shipping and

logistic sea transport.

For interdiction operations the LTTE developed two classes of small, fast boats:
fiberglass-hulled, attack craft armed with machine guns and grenade launchers, and
low-profile, armored suicide boats fitted with contact-fused, large explosive charges. In
Eelam War IV, sizeable clusters of some 30 attack craft and 8-10 suicide craft operated
as swarms, mingling with local trawler fleets to make defense difficult. These were
eventually defeated by even larger counter-swarms of 60-70 government fast attack
craft that used targeting information from some 20 shore-based coastal radars
coordinated through the command and control system the U.S. had provided.
For sea transport operations the LTTE used eleven large cargo ships that would pick
up military equipment purchased from around the globe, station themselves beyond
the Navys reach some 2,000 kms from Sri Lanka and then dash in close to the coast
and quickly offload to waiting LTTE trawlers. In Eelam War IV though, the Navy used
three recently acquired, second-hand offshore patrol vessels (including the donated exU.S. Coast Guard Cutter) combined with innovative tactics and intelligence support
from India and the U.S. to strike at the LTTEs transport ships. The last ship was sunk
in late 2007 more than 3,000 km from Sri Lanka and close to Australias Cocos
Islands.
The combination of the three factors of adopting a strategic objective matched to the
adversary, using a grand strategy that focused the whole-of-the-nation on this
objective, and adopting an optimized, subordinate military strategy proved
devastating. The LTTE was completely destroyed. The government proved able to
change its strategies in response to continuing failure and win, whereas the LTTE
doggedly stuck to its previously successful formula and lost.
Some have criticized the Sri Lankan victory as only being possible because the
government disregarded civilian casualties and used military force bluntly and
brutally. This view correctly emphasizes that wars are by their nature cruel and violent
and should not be entered into or continued lightly. However, it unhelpfully neglects
critical factors and explains little. As this article has discussed, victory came to the side
with the most successful strategies even if it took the government more than 22 years
to find them.
In this regard, a comparison with the two other Western-led counterinsurgency wars
of the period comparing soldiers and civilians killed is instructive:
Breakdown of Overall Deaths in the Conflict
Category of those
Sri Lanka War Iraq War
Afghanistan War
Killed
(1983-2009) (2004-09)
(2001-14)
Friendly Force
29%
17%
29%
Personnel
Enemy Force Personnel 37%
22%
46%

Civilians

34%

61%

25%

These were three different civil wars that each featured counterinsurgency strategies
that progressively evolved. All involved significant civilian casualties with Iraq
markedly the worse with 61 percent of those killed being civilians and Afghanistan the
best at 25 percent. The Sri Lankan war with 34 percent of those killed overall being
civilians, and thus broadly comparable to Afghanistan, then seems somewhat
unremarkable except that the Sri Lankan war was decisively won. In Iraq and
Afghanistan there was no victory, there remains no peace and people continue to die.
In Sri Lanka the guns fells silent in 2009, there is 7 percent GDP growth, low
unemployment, and steadily rising per capita incomes. Even an economically poor
country it seems can win the peace in a civil war. The key is to focus on getting the
strategy right.
Peter Layton has considerable defense experience and a doctorate in grand strategy.