The 2019 Easter Sunday attacks exposed serious weaknesses in Sri Lanka’s post-war national security and intelligence system. The report of the Parliamentary Select Committee 2019 appointed to examine the attacks highlighted several shortcomings in intelligence coordination, information sharing, institutional responsibilities, and the translation of available intelligence into timely action. In response to these concerns, the Sri Lankan Cabinet approved a proposal in 2020 to introduce a National Intelligence Act (NIA), although the proposed legislation was never enacted.
These developments provide Sri Lanka with an opportunity to reconsider a more fundamental question for its national security. What kind of intelligence system does the country need for the future? The weaknesses exposed by the Easter Sunday attacks demonstrated that intelligence reform cannot be reduced to passing new legislation, creating additional oversight mechanisms, or reorganising existing agencies.
While such measures are important, they address only part of a much larger challenge. Meaningful reform requires Sri Lanka to consider what intelligence is expected to achieve, how its intelligence institutions should be organised, what lessons should be retained from the country’s past experiences, and how intelligence can better support national-level decision-making in response to both existing and emerging security challenges.
The central objective should therefore be to reform the intelligence system, rather than simply reform the intelligence law. Against this background, this article identifies four areas that should be taken into account in developing a more effective and future-oriented intelligence system for Sri Lanka.
Threat Environment and Institutional Adaptation in Sri Lankan Intelligence
Intelligence institutions do not develop in isolation from a country’s history or the threats they are established to address. Sri Lanka’s security thinking has undergone considerable transformation since independence in 1948. Its early post-colonial approach placed considerable emphasis on diplomacy, the principles of non-alignment during the Cold War and managing external relations without relying heavily on military power. However, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrections and, more importantly, the prolonged separatist conflict fundamentally altered this environment. Decades of internal conflict inevitably shaped how political leaders, intelligence agencies, security institutions, and the wider state understood national security.
The important question today is therefore not simply what Sri Lanka learned from these conflicts, but how the prolonged internal threat environment shaped the country’s intelligence culture and institutions. For decades, Sri Lanka’s intelligence organisations operated primarily in response to insurgency, terrorism, and other domestic security threats. This encouraged the development of institutional structures, operational priorities, professional expertise, and intelligence practices designed for a particular threat environment.
Some of these conflict-era experiences created valuable institutional knowledge. Intelligence organisations developed considerable expertise in counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, human intelligence, and operating within a complex internal security environment. These capabilities should not simply be discarded. However, there is also a risk that institutional practices developed to address a specific and prolonged security challenge can become entrenched even after the threat environment has changed. Institutions may continue to prioritise familiar threats, methods, and organisational practices because these have become embedded in professional routines and institutional cultures.
This presents an important challenge for post-war Sri Lanka. The end of the separatist conflict in 2009 did not eliminate threats to national security, but it changed their character. The contemporary security environment requires intelligence institutions to address a broader spectrum of challenges, including transnational terrorism, cyber threats, organised crime, economic security, geopolitical competition, foreign influence, and other emerging risks. An intelligence system designed predominantly around the requirements of internal conflict may therefore struggle to anticipate and respond effectively to a more diverse and rapidly changing threat environment. This leads to the question of agility in strategic intelligence.
Therefore, intelligence reform should consequently involve a careful assessment of which conflict-era lessons and capabilities should be retained, which practices need to be adapted to contemporary requirements, and which approaches have outlived the circumstances in which they emerged. Understanding how the previous threat environment shaped Sri Lanka’s intelligence institutions and whether those institutional practices remain appropriate today should therefore precede decisions about what the country’s future intelligence architecture should look like.
Learning from Others, but Not Copying Them
Sri Lanka can also learn considerably from established intelligence systems. Countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States provide useful experience in intelligence legislation, coordination, professionalisation, assessment, information sharing, oversight and relations between intelligence agencies and policymakers.
However, an arrangement that works in London, Canberra or Washington will not necessarily work in Colombo. Intelligence institutions operate within particular political systems, strategic cultures, legal traditions, bureaucratic structures and security environments. Sri Lanka therefore needs adaptation rather than transplantation.
This should also be a two-way learning process. Sri Lanka is not entering intelligence reform without experience of its own. Its intelligence and security institutions have accumulated decades of knowledge from insurgency, separatist conflict, terrorism and post-conflict security. International models should therefore be used as benchmarks against which Sri Lanka can identify its strengths, weaknesses and capability gaps rather than as templates to be copied.
The objective should be an intelligence system that is internationally informed but nationally appropriate.
Intelligence as an Instrument of Statecraft
A deeper reform is also required in how intelligence itself is understood.
Sri Lanka’s intelligence system has historically been heavily influenced by internal threats, particularly insurgency, separatism and terrorism. Maintaining the ability to identify domestic security threats remains essential. Yet, contemporary intelligence cannot look only inward.
Sri Lanka operates in an increasingly complicated strategic environment. Geopolitical competition in the Indian Ocean, maritime security, economic vulnerabilities, cyber threats, technological developments, foreign influence, transnational security challenges and developments affecting Sri Lankan interests overseas all require greater strategic awareness.
Intelligence should therefore initially be understood as an instrument of statecraft. It is the capability that enables political leaders to understand their strategic environment, anticipate developments, identify risks and opportunities, and make better national-security and foreign-policy decisions.
This requires strengthening the relationship between those who produce intelligence and those who consume it. Intelligence is valuable only when relevant assessments reach decision-makers and inform policy. Reform should consequently clarify who establishes intelligence requirements, how priorities are communicated to agencies, how assessments reach policymakers, and how intelligence contributes to national decision-making.
Accountability should be strengthened alongside this process. Effectiveness and democratic accountability are not opposing objectives. Clear legislation can establish mandates, authorities and limitations while appropriate oversight can protect democratic institutions and public confidence.
Close the Structural - Functional Gap
Perhaps the most important danger is attempting to construct an elaborate legal framework without clearly establishing the intelligence system that the law is intended to govern.
The structural dimension concerns the architecture of the intelligence community; which agencies exist, where they sit within government, their reporting relationships, leadership arrangements and mechanisms for coordination.
The functional dimension concerns what those organisations actually do; their collection and analytical responsibilities, intelligence priorities, geographic and thematic mandates, and relationships with policymakers and operational agencies.
Without clarity in these areas, legislation alone cannot solve intelligence problems. Overlapping mandates can encourage duplication and institutional competition. Gaps between mandates can leave important intelligence requirements unattended. Poorly defined organisational boundaries can impede information sharing. Yet excessive consolidation can create its own problems by concentrating too much authority within a single institution.
Sri Lanka therefore needs an intelligence architecture review alongside any legislative reform. Such a review should map the existing intelligence community, identify duplication and capability gaps, clarify mandates and reporting relationships, and determine how domestic, foreign, military, criminal and strategic intelligence responsibilities should be distributed.
Importantly, reform does not automatically require creating more agencies. Strengthening existing institutions, clarifying their responsibilities and improving coordination may sometimes be more effective than establishing additional organisations.
Reform the System, Not Just the Law
Sri Lanka’s intelligence reform should ultimately answer four questions:
- What should be retained from the country’s historical intelligence experience?
- What should be adapted from international best practice?
- What legal and oversight arrangements can balance effectiveness with democratic accountability?
- And, crucially, what institutions, mandates and functions should those laws actually govern?
Answering these questions requires reform to proceed simultaneously across strategic, legal, structural and functional dimensions.
An Intelligence Act may eventually become an important part of this process. However, legislation should be the legal foundation for a coherent national intelligence system rather than being treated as the reform itself.
Sri Lanka’s objective should be more ambitious to build an intelligence community that is legally grounded, structurally coherent, functionally effective and democratically accountable, while being capable of looking both inward and outward. The real measure of intelligence reform will not be whether Sri Lanka has created new laws or institutions. It will be whether the country develops an intelligence system capable of providing its leaders with the knowledge and foresight necessary to navigate an increasingly complex strategic environment.
