Commander of the Army (Sri Lanka)
head of the Sri Lanka Army
The commander of the Army (Sinhala: ශ්රී ලංකාවේ යුද්ධ හමුදාපති, romanized: śrī laṁkāvē yuddha hamudāpati) is the title of the professional head of the Sri Lanka Army. The current commander of the Army is Lieutenant General Nilantha Premaratne.
The post's precursor was known as Commander of the Ceylon Defence Force.
Serving army commanders have by convention been of the rank of Lieutenant General, promoted to the rank of General on the day of their retirement or after getting the appointment of Chief of Defence Staff which post is now obsolete. Sepala Attygalle was the first army commander who was promoted to full general on the day of his retirement in 1977. Tissa Weeratunga was the second commander to be promoted to the rank of full general on the day of his retirement in 1985 (after serving as the general officer commanding of the joint operations command).
Sarath Fonseka, Jagath Jayasuriya and Shavendra Silva were elevated to the rank of general while serving as commander. Denis Perera and Nalin Seneviratne were promoted to full general in 2007 after 26 years and 19 years of retirement respectively.
The official residence of the commander is General's House, Colombo.
List of commanders
From Hamilton Wanasinghe (appointed in 1988) customarily all army commanders are lieutenant generals and were later promoted to full general on the day of their retirement or after becoming the g.o.c.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Commander of the Army (Sri Lanka)” as head of the Sri Lanka Army. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4229215. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1985, 2007 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Commander of the Army (Sri Lanka)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.