Privileges at Whose Cost?

Defence gets the biggest budgetary allocation in Sri Lanka and understandably so due to three decades of civil war or whatever one wants to call it.

Now there is no war or even a remote possibility of one, but the defence budget keeps rising every year, depriving much-needed funds for others like education and health.

Both education and health do not even get a 3% allocation.

That is a very sad thing, and recently we became the country in South Asia with the highest number of malnourished children.

When calls for defence cuts surface, many blame such calls on either the JVP or the Tamil Diaspora for incitement.

I really do not know whether they really originate from one of the sources mentioned above by many.

But I agree with their call, not because I am a member or a sympathizer of any of those.

Those who have read my blog and other writings for more than two decades are well aware of my position on both entities.

Recently in a speech given to a Lawyers Association by Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka, the one who really won the war against the terrorist group mentioned how the funds and facilities are abused by the defence official.

He has attended a defence college in the UK and some of the interesting points mentioned about him are as below in dot points.

• The college is housed in a six-story building in London's centre.
• The facility's commanding officer is a Two-Star General who takes public transportation to work.
• Each training course has 80 students from various parts of the world.
• The unit was run by only 35 people, both academic and non-academic.
• Generally, two students per staff member.

Then he compared it to the Sri Lanka Army Officers’ training unit at Batalanda.

• 50 officers eligible for the major rank are trained there in each session.
• There are more than 350 staff (academic and non-academic) to run the unit
• The ratio here is seven (07) staff for each student.

The link to his speech is given below, if anyone wants to listen and verify facts.

The Sri Lanka Army's utilization of resources, in comparison, is absurd, to say the least.

According to the Army Act of Sri Lanka,

•  A single-vehicle can only be used to transport officers of a certain rank and above.
• The officer should be in his/her uniform.
• No one other than the driver is permitted in the vehicle.
• The only exception to allowing another person in the same vehicle is when the officer is required to attend a ceremony and is entitled to have the spouse accompany him or her.
• And the officer has to be in the appropriate attire to suit the occasion.

However, if you visit any prestigious school in Colombo, you would notice a large number of military force cars delivering students.

So it is at numerous supermarkets, where you will witness a soldier carrying the shopping of an officer's wife.

These are quite common observations on a daily basis.

This is an example of resource mismanagement.

Those who support defence budget cutbacks, such as myself, are asking for a reduction in those silly expenditures rather than meaningful investments such as training the brightest minds in the country in modern and frontier war techniques and know-how.

All we do currently is use defence colleges to recruit poor talent into the defence system, and we will not go any further with such investments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVNRijfQrRI