President Dmitry Medvedev has signed a decree reducing the number of military personnel in the Armed Forces in yet another step towards a transforming the Russian Army into a professional, contract-based defense force. According to the new decree, issued earlier this week, by Jan.1, 2016, the Army and Naval Fleet will consist of 1,884,829 people, including civilian personnel. Military personnel will number 1 million, down from 1.3 million. Another major difference is that military personnel will consist largely of contracted soldiers, rather than conscripts. In February, Defense Mi­nister Anatoly Serdyukov issued a directive to start creating educational groups in the St. Petersburg Military and Space Academy, the Moscow Military Command High School, and other cities across Russia. Each group will consist of 100 people taken from volunteer soldiers and conscripts. The educational groups will train professional sergeants, who will graduate after two and a half years in the facility. "After they complete the training, the contract sergeants will get a diploma for higher specialized education," the official Rossiyskaya Gazeta quoted General Staff Chief Nikolai Makarov as saying. "They will direct military collectives on a professional basis." Graduates from these educational groups will be used to staff military units of permanent combat readiness. The decrees are part of a federal program that aims to transfer sergeants and other officers serving in the military to a contract-basis. Today, most sergeants and many other officers in the Russian Armed Forces are conscripted. The program stipulates that by 2013 over 85,000 junior officers will be professional rather than conscripted. Earlier last fall, Serdyukov had announced one of the most radical measures to reform the army, slashing the officer corps to about one-sixth of its former size and introducing changes to the command structure. The move, announced in October, was deemed necessary but controversial, because it would involve officers who could end up losing their jobs. Later, the Kommersant business daily reported that Nikolai Markov had signed a directive on "the inadmissibility of divulging information on the reform of the Russian armed forces."