Members of the 94th Military Police Company are back in the United States. Finally.

The 94th was called up in December 2002 and sent to Iraq in April 2003. The unit’s tour was extended twice. First in October 2003, and then again in April. And then pesky plane problems kept the men and women on hold waiting for a ride home last week.

We’re proud of the 150 or so members of the 94th and their families, who kept the home fires burning and never stopped advocating for their soldiers.

Unfortunately, the tale of the 94th’s long deployment is not that unusual for National Guard and Reserve soldiers.

About 50 percent of all the soldiers serving in Iraq are drawn from Reserve forces. In all, more than 200,000 Guard and Reserve soldiers are on active duty, and the majority of the 10,000 military police in Iraq are reservists.

The strain on families and communities can be devastating. Work has begun to increase the size of the active-duty Army by 20,000, and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry proposes adding 40,000 new troops to the Army.

That’s all well and good, and clearly the continued deployment of a large-scale force in Iraq requires an expansion of the number of people serving in uniform. But other changes in the military’s structure are also needed. Some of these have begun.

Too many of the specialty forces – like military police, engineers and logistics experts – are concentrated in the Reserves. As the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown, these are some of the jobs in highest demand when it comes time to help a country rebuild.

Some of this work has already begun. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has ordered the military to come up with draft plans for restructuring Reserve forces and to limit the length and frequency of deployments.

Pressure needs to be taken off the country’s National Guard and Reserves. The 94th has performed admirably and for an extended time. Hopefully, members won’t be called upon again any time soon. They’ve earned a break.

Getting started

We applaud Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman for grabbing the initiative on the Sept. 11 commission report. Bipartisan cooperation and determination to break potential logjams in Washington will be required if they are to be successful in reforming the country’s intelligence capacity.

Despite the Democratic National Convention, which wrapped up the night before Friday’s first hearing, and the congressional recess that has most members on vacation, Republican Collins and Democrat Lieberman began the process of debating the commission’s recommendations.

Promises of bipartisanship are heartening, as was the conduct of the proceedings. Commission Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton have urged the committee to move with haste to reform the U.S. intelligence community.

There’s no time to waste, we agree. But rushing headlong into adopting the recommendations would be as foolish as doing nothing at all. At issue during Friday’s hearings were two specific ideas: Creating a cabinet-level director of national intelligence and organizing a National Counterterrorism Center that would combine domestic and international antiterrorism operations.

We are leery of both of these proposals. Adding a new level of bureaucracy into the intelligence system and further politicizing the system would exacerbate the problems that allowed dots to go unconnected in the years before Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq. And blurring the lines between law enforcement and spy services could undermine the civil liberties of U.S. citizens.

But we welcome an open debate and are encouraged that the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee has begun the hard work of sorting through the Sept. 11 commission’s report.