John Adams Wickham is a retired four-star general and was the Army Chief of Staff from 1983 to 1987 under President Reagan. He has lived in Tucson since 1992.

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The time may be right for Americans to re-examine our policy to fight insurgencies. For many years, U.S. forces and dollars have been used to fight insurgencies with a big U.S. presence, including large bases, vast storage depots and extensive contractor activities. This approach has produced mixed results.

Local populations have come to view this large footprint as an infringement on sovereignty and believe that it has engendered wider conflict as well as insurgent support.

Given the probability of future insurgencies with the so-called global war on terror, pressures will persist for continued substantial deployments of U.S. forces and expenditures of considerable resources rather than considering potentially effective alternatives.

As in Vietnam and now in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. military leaders rightly believe that U.S. forces are far superior in traditional military skills to indigenous people. So we naturally will try to take the lead in combat. We tend to give fewer resources to the alternative of preparing and supporting local forces to do the job.

Working with indigenous forces is viewed as less glamorous than leading U.S. forces into combat, hence military planners have a natural bent toward deploying U.S. forces rather than building indigenous capabilities.

Despite legendary American prowess in traditional military combat, counterinsurgency requires an ability to gain support of the populace, and here local forces have the advantage.

For example, during the 1950s the United States successfully countered an insurgency in the newly independent Philippines by supporting the local government and its land-reform movements rather than directly engaging the guerrillas.

Before 1965, we built and supported indigenous forces in Vietnam to fight the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces. Then we deployed major U.S. combat forces, along with a vast support infrastructure, because of impatience with progress in the war and the belief that we could do the job far better than local forces.

As the war dragged on, rising American resentment against it caused President Nixon to turn over fighting to South Vietnamese forces by "Vietnamizing" the war. By then U.S. public support for the war was almost lost and we withdrew entirely by 1973, leaving South Vietnamese forces to face defeat in 1975.

It is true that some solid progress has occurred in Iraq, and we are making uneven progress in developing Iraqi forces. Yet these gains may be fragile. Rising clamor among Iraqis for more independence may undermine our future ability to sustain progress. We see some of this difficulty with the Iraqi government's reluctance to sign the negotiated status-of-forces agreement.

Meanwhile, we are considering a major infusion of more U.S. troops and dollars into Afghanistan in an effort to thwart a rising Taliban insurgency.

An alternative policy would focus much more than we are doing now on training, equipping and supporting indigenous forces to fight insurgencies in their own region and in their own ways, rather than for U.S. forces to do most of the direct fighting. This alternative would require a large increase in training teams and advisers, as we employed in Vietnam, to create indigenous capabilities and to improve current forces, including militias.

It also would require that we share intelligence to improve effectiveness of combat operations, share counterinsurgency doctrine, provide modern communications support, and make available aerial support, particularly with armed drones.

The direct fighting against insurgents would be done by indigenous forces, not U.S. ground forces, unless necessary.

It is true that building effective indigenous forces takes time and U.S. forces probably could do the fighting more effectively, but the large footprint that U.S. forces inevitably bring to the fight inevitably creates local perceptions about infringement on sovereignty and may draw in further insurgent support.

Historically, more than half of U.S. forces deployed for insurgency do not fight but fulfill support functions, and we increasingly have come to rely on a wide variety of contractor capabilities, all of which add to the size and expense of our footprint whenever we decide to take on the job of fighting insurgency ourselves.

In a similar vein, Americans need to rely more upon the local forces for humanitarian and civil affairs types of work in order to avoid the perception that we are becoming too intrusive for the people that we are trying to help.

Would the alternative policy cost less than the current policy? Yes, because we would not be building large overseas bases, nor stretching U.S. armed forces to the breaking point, nor would we incur the long-range costs of caring for large numbers of injured veterans.

As an example of burgeoning care requirements, Veterans Affairs estimates that more than 320,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have serious brain injuries, although most of these veterans have yet to enter hospitals.

We, of course, would incur the costs of arming indigenous forces, and of the associated training and operational and logistic support. We are doing some of this already in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not enough and not on a top-priority basis, just as we failed to do in Vietnam. But these costs would be far less than those associated with a deployment of large numbers of U.S. forces.

Consequently, U.S. public support probably could be sustained over a longer period than we experienced in Vietnam and what we see today with Iraq and Afghanistan. This support may be vitally important because of growing public weariness with the current policy of deploying substantial U.S. forces and resources on missions of "chasing insurgents" in various countries.

Because local forces are more likely to gain the acceptance of the populace, we stand a better chance of ultimately prevailing in this type of conflict.