Both 2 and 3 SF raiding/recon parties use Zodiac CRRCs for beach reconnaissance, surveillances and limited strike operations closer to beaches. 3 Special Forces established in 1996 is primarily a Seabourne force.

On 18th January 1993 the Sri Lanka Navy also established its elite seabourne force, the Special Boat Squadron. The SBS is also renowned for their use of the Zodiac CRRC.

International use and developments

The Zodiac CRRC is used by the world's best amphibious assault teams including the US Navy SEALS, US Marines' Force Recon, Royal Marines, Shayetet 13 etc. It can inflate in seconds to a highly maneuverable craft recognized the world over by elite units.

One notable weakness of the craft is its inability as an inflatable dinghy to withstand amphibious ambushes. The United States Navy is currently testing out an armoured version of the CRRC. The 'Armour -Flate' design uses a light-weight ballistic protection system that uses a synthetic polyethylene fibre called Dyneema, which is 15 times stronger than steel but much lighter.

The Balistic Protection Flate Armour is strapped along the sides of the CRRC and is inflated in under 5 minutes forming a protective ridge around the dinghy with the support of an 80 cubic foot air-tank. This gives the raiders an opportunity to escape unharmed if ambushed.

I have seen the article written about MR and the family in the airforce blog.

I am not going to defend MR or his family.The corruption you mentioned is exagerated..I should say..

What is most likely happening is, Russians must be offering these Mig29C with the credit line you mentioned..Nothing more , nothing less..When it comes to negotiations, Russians are the most unpredicatable and toughest..There is also the possibility you get a very RAW deal in the end..May be it is like, you get either Mig29's or nothing..You know what I mean..It is better you don't count the no of teeths of the horse you get free of charge..Russia will not charge us what they usually charge from India..I can tell you that too..

Came across below article in lankatruth.com . would you help me to work out how senior below terror leader is? How much of moral killing this would be for the LTTE?

"Another tiger leader killedVinothan, a senior tiger leader was killed in clashes that occurred at Kallikulam in Vavuniya today. This has been revealed by listening to tiger communications say security sources.Meanwhile, tiger terrorists who are being defeated in Mannar area are fleeing leaving their weapons and other equipments say reports. In search operations carried out after the clashes Security Forces have been able to find a large number of weapons and other equipments the terrorist had abandoned. "

It is true that the 57 Division which was formed as the first offensive Division to launch a major thrust on the Vavuniya front in February 2007, took more than nine months to advance 10 kilometres towards Tiger territory.

At the initial stages there had been many setbacks and many of the captured territories were fallen to the hands of the LTTE compelling them to withdraw from their positions towards the original Forward Defence Line.

There was a higher casualty rate among the troops in the Vavuniya Front as they had to brave heavy minefields and booby traps to advance into the Tiger territory.

But the 57 Division which is operating under the Command of Brigadier Jagath Jayasuriya has advanced more than seven kilometres within the first two months of this year. That means they have achieved more than what they had achieved within the first nine months of their operations during the past two months.

The 57 Division which is operating as three brigades is now further advancing towards the North with troops reaching closer to Palampiddi in one direction and passing Vilattikulam from another direction.

Simply they have cleared the path to Wanni very effectively to speed up their process of liberating Wanni with the formation of two other offensive Divisions in Mannar and Weli Oya.

The Mannar front which was initially started its operation as Task Force -I in the last quarter of 2007 under the Command of Brigadier Chargi Gallage and later handed over to Brigadier Shavindra Silva after forming it as 58 Division has also achieved remarkable progress during past two months.

From the capture of Silavatura in the South of Mannar the 58 Division had advanced further into the Tiger territory in the North of Mannar. There were few decisive battles in the Mannar front within a week with troops advancing in many fronts towards the Tiger territory capturing their heavily fortified bunker lines.

The adverse whether conditions now prevailing in Mannar had not become a hindrance to these operations as troops are committed to achieve their task disregarding any barriers before them.

So far there have not been any reverses for them despite heavy resistance they had to face from the LTTE with the barrages of artillery and mortar directed at the troops advancing towards the North.

They are now in full control of the West of Giant tank area towards Manthai in the North of Mannar on Mannar Sangupiddi road. The only exception in this territory is the Adampan town.

The 59 Division which is operating in Weli Oya since mid of January this year under the command of Brigadier Nandana Udawatta has also made speedy advance towards Northward direction by advancing four Kilometres into Tiger territory from Janakapura, Karuvalagaswewa front and one and half kilometres from the beach front from Kokkuthuduvai.

The 59 Division confirms the fact that 245 terrorists have been killed in the Weli Oya front against the 45 soldiers killed during this period.

The Jaffna front is also operating successfully though they had not made any advances towards the Tiger territory from Muhamalai and Nagar Kovil fronts.

But time to time the troops are taking control over the Tiger defences temporarily at least for few hours but withdraw towards their original defences without holding the defences permanently as the LTTE has already registered their artillery guns towards their own defences to thwart any advance by troops into their territory.

On Tuesday the troops held their positions in the Tiger defences in the West of A-9 road for nearly five hours but later withdrew to its original defences.

The field commanders and also the Army Commander in fact, accepts the fact the casualty rate among the troops is comparatively high due to booby traps and minefields they have to cross in their advance towards Tiger territory. But the encouraging factor is that 50 per cent of these troops are reporting back to their duties after treatment.

Army recruitment The other positive factor is that there is greater enthusiasm from the youth of this country to join the Army. Within the first two months of this year 10,000 youth have joined the Army adding to the 32,000 youth joined the Army in the year 2007.

The Army is in need of another 15,000 to fulfil its required strength for this year. Once it completes the recruitment drive the full strength of the Army will shoot up to 160,000 enabling the troops to achieve the target of liberating the Wanni soon.

This achievement will enable the Army to deploy well trained troops to the battlefront and deploy troops to hold the ground once they capture Tiger territory. The provision of arms and ammunition and the welfare measures will enable the troops to keep their morale high in the battle grounds.

The civilian factor The LTTE too continued its recruitment drive despite losing the control of a huge population in the East and also in Jaffna and Wanni. They are depending on the 250,000 population entrapped in Wanni to increase their strength. As long as the civilian population continue to live in the LTTE held areas the task before the Security Forces will be a difficult one.

But the battle in the Wanni is expected to turn into decisive phase in the coming weeks as troops are about to enter civilian populated areas in Vavuniya and Mannar. Early signals on an exodus of civilians to Government held areas emerged this week with more than 20 civilians arriving in Government held areas in Mannar from Vedithalthivu area.

This is a situation similar to the Vakarai and South of Batticaloa as only few families who managed to escape from the LTTE arrived in Government held areas.

Later almost all the civilians entrapped in these areas arrived in Government held areas ahead of the confrontations between the Security Forces and the LTTE. If such a situation developed in the Mannar and Vavuniya fronts the troops will be able to continue its thrust on the LTTE without any hindrance.

Therefore, the troops are now poised to enter the most decisive phase in the Wanni battle to decide on the future of the Wanni liberation.

perein,Vinothan was an area leader. The article on LRRP is good but has the usual 'public knowledge type' of info. There's more to it than meets he eye and we should not discuss these in any way. By the way, Balagalla didn't create LRRP. He, as an Int Officer appreciated it and encouraged it.

Regardless of your view point, it will be beneficial to all readers if you just put the link to the site of interest than republishing the whole text here with some commentry. Below is an example on how to do it, replace [ with < and ] with > for the link to work.

[a href="http://www.w3.org"]my commentry[/a]

and this is how it works when square brackes are replaces as suggested above. Don't forget that quotation marks are required for this to work.

Sam Perera-Good suggestion.However note there are some articles which does not allow a unique URL to give. At those events may be we should stick to showing the web site name.ie: My last posting with lankatruth.com text on.

Many articles were popping up recently commenting advanced long range capabilities of armed forces. If one investigates the cause of this, one can easily find the origin which is the death of TNA parliamentarian Sivanesan.Most of the authors does so not because of their shear admiration of the armed forces and their caphabilities but as a head note to indicate armed forces complicity to MP Sivanesan’s death.The major weakness many of us having is not being able to differentiate between anti LTTE activism and unity based patriotism. One being an anti LTTE activist doesn’t mean that he is pro unitary (or united). Racially motivated Tamil nationalism was the breeding ground for LTTE (power hungry, some times racist sinhala counterpart contributed a lot too). But as time went by it was dawned on the minds of some of these nationalists (Tamil), what a monster they have created and some fortunate ones did not survive (they were eaten by the same monster) to suffer seeing the blunder they have made. Now the Tamil race is being destroyed by LTTE (both by its actions and ideology and by others reactions). Seeing actually what’s happening many intelligent Tamil nationalists are fast becoming anti LTTE activists. They are extremely brave otherwise they wouldn’t decide to go against LTTE. Foolish tiger sympathizers think they are traitors and trying to find ways to eliminate them. And we stupidly think they are with us (there are exceptions, I am generalizing here). But none of the above is correct. This intelligent breed still believes in power devolution along ethnic lines. If the eelam is achievable without the LTTE monster they would go for that. Some fraction of them does not like to see LTTE completely crushed because they correctly guess that it would loose their leverage on the matters related. I think D.B.S. Jeyaraj and UTHR (and many others) fall in to this category. They hate LTTE. They hate the government. They don’t like anybody winning. They have their own goals. But they don’t know how to achieve them. They bend the truth time to time when reporting but many people do not notice them because the reports are critical of both sides. (In our present mindset we tend to think there are only two kinds of interests related to the problem namely government interests and LTTE interests, which is not true.)Having said all these I just wanted to highlight one thing. We shouldn’t make heroes out of people (or organizations like UTHR) just touching the surface of what they are writing. They can be brave. They can be intelligent. But they may not be serving our interests. Here our interests means, interests of a nation with no ethnic boundaries and the rule of the land applied to everybody equally.

6) Formal apology (signed by VP) for all the crimes committed against the people of Sri Lanka.

7) Voluntary removal of all illegal graves and memorials.

8) Repairs of all the damages to structures and infrastructure caused by LTTE acts of terror since it's beginning.

9) Voluntarily locate all the LTTE hideouts and underground bunkers for SLA/SLAF to clear.

10) Replant the jungles where LTTE built illegal airstrips.

LTTE needs not to give up weapons, they can have what they have now but no more imports or productions. As stated above, SL forces will stop operations only 5 years after LTTE stops all violence. Any simple suspected (need not to be proven) act against the people of Sri Lanka will reset the clock to zero and another five years will go on.

Actually GSL need to make a counter offer as you said. But in any case GSL should not stop SLDF offensives. And now SLDF need more vigilance and be prepared.

Mere rejection of LTTE fake peace offer negatively affected GSL in the int. ground. GSL has two options.1) Offer some thing LTTE has to reject for sure-easy way.2) Make a reasonale offer and take the challange of managing things in both battlefield and negotiation process-hard way.

As I see GSL need LTTE to agree for a solution within an undiveded country. i.e. Give up eelaam demand. Since it is very clear GSL can't negotiate about dividing country this obvious condition should be there in any genuine peace talk. Otherwise no point in talking.

We are unable yet to seal off the entire Mannar sea front due to inadequacy of shallow draft armed vessels. Our guys bleed due to arms smuggled thru that route.

Logistics are suffering due to inadequacy of transport aircraft. So is transport to and fro for frontline soldiers.

In some cases, lack of close air support has caused preventable loss of life.

These are just a few of the issues we are facing now, which as our guys reach further into hostile terrain will become aggravated.

I'm sure there are more useful things to buy with the Russian 500Mil.

My bigger problem is with MR's family being the ones doing the business. That just stinks, even if the Mig29 is the most desperately needed thing right now, which it is not.

Also remember, denial of territory has already caused the tiger tincans to fly one-way only next time. So the next flight will be a suicide run. From what I understand from experts in the business, what we have right now is more than enough to counter that threat. Even successful suicide runs by the remaining three or so Zlins, which would carry at most a ton of explosives at most, is not going to change the fortunes of this war.

What we need is better preparedness to use what we have and training to deal with the issue rather than entirely new systems which will take monstrous amounts of training time to operate efficiently. Remember how inefficient we were at using the very same Kfirs and Mig27s for years, until better training made a huge difference?

Sam and Ninja,LTTE has to give up weapons. That should be the only precondition. Doesn't matter weather they agree or not, we are going to win. The main indicator of the situation of the war is the behavior of the Northern civilians. Civilian exodus from north has change from a trickle to a steady rate during last week. It says a lot. I believe the East is going to be repeated. Much analysis regarding this is based on a false fact that is static civilian mindset (Who lives under LTTE control). Most pundits conclude that northern war is going to be hundred times harder than the eastern war. The reasons, LTTE is more prepared, they have more weapons and cadres and most importantly the tigers are more popular in the north among civilians. True, to some extent. But without stating they assume that the above factors are static with time, which is not correct.Specially the last one, being ordered to bear so many hardships civilians may drift away from the tigers faster than many think. I for one think the process has already begun.

"By the way, I was watching the first kfir being test flown in Katunayake by an Israeli pilot in 1993 when we heard a distant boom!That was the attack on the Central Bank."

This is untrue.

First kfir was flown in SL in 1995. There were no Kfirs in SL in 1993. Israel denied all military assiatance to SL during premadasa/wijetunga time due to RP's closure of the "israel interest section" at the US embassy.CB bomb was in January 1996.

I do not think that LTTE would ever accept a unitary solution. Therefore, we should ask Velu to sign a declaration of acceptance of an undivided SL. As the title of the Island article says, this is nothing less than another bluff. However, we got to be smart enough to convince others that we responded frankly and LTTE stonewalls any progress. Regardless, Velu will never come to negotiating table since,

1) His ego is gone.2) Loss of funding from Diaspora.3) Loss of absolute control on the people in North.

Let play the game with Velu in his own style. However, if he accepts my conditions, he has to turn himself in for the alleged crimes. The only realistic end I see here is Velu meeting the same fate as Adolf Hitler. Hope that day is not far away.

These barbarians thrive in chaos, since terrorism is all they know. even when the north and east were handed over to the lTTE ona plate by Ranil, all infrastrucutre and recurring costs had to be borne by the SLG. All that the LTTE did was puff-up and parade while killing off hundreds if not thousands of people in a progrom, they considered opposed to them. These bastards only know destruction and in the absence of chaos they cease to exist. That's exactly why they wanted Ranil to lose and someone who'd enter into a war to come into power. Well they succeeded, but didn't quite understand what had come into power, until it bit.

India is a growing country for all kind of Industrial Machines, We are doing all kind of industrial application where Gears is our USP from passed 60 years. We are leading Gears Manufacturers in India, We are specialized in all type of Gears for almost all type of industrial application like industrial gears, marine gears, defence gears, power gears etc. There are so many Gears Manufacturers in all over India where We are supplying huge quantity gears in all over world from India. Thanks for sharing this blog with us.