Caetano's Portuguese Government began also a military reform that gave the opportunity to militia officers who completed a brief training program and had served in the overseas territories' defensive campaigns, of being commissioned at the same rank as military academy graduates in order to increase the number of officials employed against the African insurgencies, and at the same time cut down military costs to alleviate an already overburdened government budget. Thus, a group of disgusted captains started to instigate their peers to conspire against the new laws proposed by the regime. The protest of Portuguese Armed Forces captains against a decree law: the "Dec. Lei nº 353/73" of 1973. would therefore lie behind a military coup on 25 April 1974 – the Carnation Revolution.