Quadrennial Fire Review 2009

Final Report

January 2009
 

December 2008

Dear Reader,

The Quadrennial Fire Review (QFR) is a strategic assessment process that is conducted every 

four years to evaluate current mission strategies and capabilities against best estimates of the future environment for fire management. This integrated review is a joint effort of the five federal 

natural resource management agencies and their state, local, and tribal partners that constitute 

the wildland fire community. The objective is to create an integrated strategic vision document 

for fire management. 

The 2009 QFR presents incoming federal policy leadership and the agency senior executives 

with the driving forces for change, suggested mission strategies, and analyses of workforce 

and operational capabilities. The document provides a solid foundation for policy discussions 

within the federal agencies and, importantly, among the federal agencies and state, local, tribal, 

and other partners. While the QFR is not a formal policy or decision document, it sets the stage 

for a “strategic conversation” about future direction and change in fire management.

Our thanks goes to the QFR Integration Panel members who led the two-year analysis and 

review process and who prepared the final report, along with those members of the wildland fire 

community who submitted information, commentary, and suggestions during the process. 

We look forward to joining our wildland fire colleagues in using the QFR to chart and implement a national approach to wildland fire management.

Jim Douglas

Chair

Fire Executive Council NASF Forest Fire Protection Committee

Jeff Jahnke

Chair
 December 18, 2008 

Abigail Kimbell James Caswell 

Chief, USDA Forest Service Director, Bureau of Land Management 

1400 Independence Avenue, SW 1849 C Street NW, Rm. 5665 

Washington DC 20250 Washington DC 20240 

H. Dale Hall Mary A. Bomar 

Director, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director, National Park Service 

MailStop 3238 MIB 1849 C Street NW 

1849 C St., NW Washington, DC 20240 

Washington, D.C. 20240 

Jerry Gidner 

Director, Bureau of Indian Affairs 

MS-4004-MIB 

1849 C Street, NW 

Washington, D.C. 20240 

Dear Colleagues, 

On behalf of the National Association of State Foresters, I express our appreciation for the opportunity for 

state forestry agencies to participate as full partners in the development, review and completion of the 

2009 Quadrennial Fire Review (QFR). We endorse the processes utilized in the development of the 2009 

QFR. Identifying forces driving change in wildland fire and assessing current programs and capabilities 

for comparison with future needs should provide valuable insight in addressing the many challenges we 

are all experiencing. We recognize the significant role the mission, strategies and assessments may 

provide to the wildland fire community. 

Not all state forestry agencies will concur with each of the assessments, strategies and considerations in 

the report but we all recognize the importance of the document in framing future dialogue on wildlland 

fire management issues. 

The states’ commitment to participate in the process ensured that a broad range of interests were 

considered and melded into the report. We look forward to additional interaction and participation in 

implementation. 

Sincerely, 

Leah W. MacSwords 

President

National Association of State Foresters 
Table of Contents

Foreword .............................................................................................................................i

Executive Summary.............................................................................................................iii

I. Introduction: Wildland Fire in the First Decade of the 21st Century ..................................1

Looking Back: Wildfire Costs, Programs, and Policy Developments ..........................................2

Looking Forward – Emerging Threats and Risks .......................................................................6

Driving Forces for Future Change .............................................................................................9

Effects of Climate Change ..........................................................................................................9

Cumulative Drought Effects and Fuels .......................................................................................10

Continued Risk in the Wildland Urban Interface .........................................................................12

Escalating Emergency Response Demands...............................................................................14

Fiscal Stress and Budget Realities ...........................................................................................15

II. Mission Strategies: Fire Management’s Next Decade ..................................................17

Asymmetric Fire and Strategic Management Response ............................................................19

Reshaping Emergency Response within Fire Leadership ..........................................................20

Reaffirming Fire Governance: ...................................................................................................21

Building a National Intergovernmental Wildfire Policy Framework .............................................21

Achieving “Fire Adapted Communities” ......................................................................................23

Cross-cutting Strategies: An Integrated Fuels Portfolio In Support of Land 

Management Objectives .........................................................................................................25

Cross-Cutting Strategies - New Platforms for InformationSharing and 

Education (Web 1.0/Web 2.0).....................................................................................................27

Looking to the Future: Balancing Risk – Creating New Results ...............................................29

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III. Workforce Capabilities, Structure and Preparedness.....................................................30

Current Force Structure ..............................................................................................................30

Workforce Preparedness and Development ...............................................................................31

Creating New Workforce Skill Set Requirements........................................................................34

Strengthening the Workforce ......................................................................................................34

IV. Operations, Capital Resources, and Technologies ........................................................36

Capital Assets: Equipment & Aviation Resources.......................................................................36

Modernizing Aviation ..................................................................................................................37

Improving Strategic Sourcing......................................................................................................39

Preparing Fire Management for Future Operations ....................................................................40

Advancing Decision Support and Prioritization ...........................................................................41

Improving Resource Coordination .............................................................................................41

Providing More Flexible Logistical Support ................................................................................42

Future Directions in Resources and Technology ........................................................................43

Appendix A...........................................................................................................................A-1

 References

Appendix B..........................................................................................................................B-1

 Quadrennial Fire Review Methodology

Appendix C .........................................................................................................................C-1

 QFR Panels and Acknowledgements

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Figures and Tables

Figure 1 Federal 10-Year Suppression Average.........................................................................2

Table 1A U.S. Annual Number of Wildfires & Acres ....................................................................7

Table 1B Number of Wildfire and Acres in Geographic Areas 2004-2008 .................................8

Figure 2 Federal Large Wildfires 1979-2008 ..............................................................................9

Table 2 USFS & Department of Interior Fuels Treatment Acres – 2004-2008 ...........................12

Table 3 Preparedness Resources ..............................................................................................31

Figure 3 Federal Firefighters by Qualification Level by Age .......................................................33

Table 4 Fire Equipment Resources (2008-2009) ........................................................................36

Figure 4 National Preparedness Levels 4 & 5 1999-2008 .........................................................40
Foreword

This 2009 Quadrennial Fire Review (QFR) builds from its predecessor -- the 2005 QFR -- to advance a unified 

fire-management strategic vision for the five federal natural resource management agencies under the Departments 

of the Interior and Agriculture with the active participation of many of their partners in the larger fire community.

The source idea for the QFR was the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review model, which for the 

past two decades, has served as a vehicle for the military to reexamine shifts in military strategy and changes in 

organizational tactics and capabilities. Similarly, the intention of the QFR is to examine the future environment 

of wildland fire and provide “projective thinking” about potential shifts in mission, roles, responsibilities, and 

agency relationships while surveying new course directions for fire management. It is important to note that, as an 

interagency assessment, the QFR is purely advisory in tone. In terms of strategy evaluation, its value is to reaffirm 

interagency fire management priorities and help shape discussion about investment decisions for the future.

To ensure an integrated perspective, the QFR focuses on fire management as a whole enterprise. There is no 

review of the separate programs -- Preparedness, Prevention, Suppression, Fuel Reduction, and Restoration -- or 

the functions that make up fire and fuel management. Integration also means that the five federal public lands 

agencies with wildland fire responsibilities (the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Fish 

and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior and the U. S. Forest 

Service within the Department of Agriculture) conduct this review as a joint effort. State, local, tribal and nongovernment partners in the greater wildland fire community also were asked to participate in different phases of 

the QFR effort to ensure that a broad range of interests were fully considered and melded into the final report. A 

more detailed description of the methodology used for the QFR can be found at the end of the report. 

In terms of logic, the report emphasizes core mission strategies and key capabilities that must be developed, 

strengthened and modernized to meet the challenges of the future wildfire environment. It summarizes the likely 

impacts of the most significant driving forces behind this dynamic environment: climate change effects, drought 

and fuel conditions, demographic shifts and public expectations in the wildland urban interface. Two new driving 

forces, fire management’s involvement in emergency response as a result of probable increases in natural disasters 

and acute levels of budgetary stress and funding shortages facing all government units out of the worst economic 

recession in decades, are noted. 

The QFR advances new core strategies for reinforcing fire management’s role in ecosystem sustainability by 

developing strategic management response capabilities that are more flexible and agile and further in line with 

the national response framework. While continuing to promote the concept of fire-adapted human communities, 

the QFR outlines new strategies to realign fire governance by rethinking federal, tribal, and state and local 

roles and responsibilities for wildland urban interface fire prevention and protection. Tied to this mission 

strategy of building a new national intergovernmental wildfire policy framework, are specific strategy elements 

for developing community fuels reduction zones in the interface, supporting leave-early or stay-and-defend 

alternatives for property owners while working with communities to assure that community fire prevention 

regulations are in place along with adequate local response capability. 

These core strategies are supported by two crosscutting strategies that dissect all fire management programs. 

An integrated fuels management portfolio is outlined that would help ensure fuels treatments investments are 

tied more closely to land stewardship objectives and that small scale, localized treatments are supplanted by 
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larger, multi-jurisdictional landscape scale efforts. Finally, the QFR calls for re-envisioning public outreach and 

information processing by creating new content, establishing new mediums and platforms for information sharing 

and environmental education with new social networks about all aspects of fire management and public land 

management. 

Shifts in mission strategies such as those outlined in the 2009 QFR will necessarily require realigning current 

capabilities, building additional skills in the workforce across functions and within the incident management 

team organization, modernizing capital assets, and in some cases, creating next-generation systems decisionsupport and resource management tools. This goes well beyond simply reorganizing work processes and refining 

coordination mechanisms. Meeting future demands, while sustaining fire management’s overarching commitment 

to firefighter and public safety, will demand more than a shared common vision and strengthened collaborative 

processes. There must also be greater expectations about the combined effort of the agencies, the tribal and state 

and local partners, and the contracting community. As the QFR final report notes: “Given the threats and risks of 

the escalating wildfire challenge, the path forward must seek to ensure that the efforts of all the stakeholders in 

fire management reinforce and multiply each other – so the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts.” 

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group Executive Board, as the signatory body to the 2009 QFR Report, fully 

endorses its strategies and capabilities for the future of fire management.

Tom Harbour Tim Murphy

Director, Fire and Aviation Management Deputy Assistant Director, Fire and Aviation

USDA Forest Service Bureau of Land Management

Lyle Carlile Tom Nichols 

Fire Director Fire and Aviation Division Chief

Bureau of Indian Affairs National Park Service

Brian McManus Dan Smith

Fire Director Fire Director

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Association of State Foresters
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Executive Summary

The Quadrennial Fire Review (QFR) is a strategic assessment process that is conducted every four years 

to evaluate current mission strategies and capabilities against best estimates of future environment for fire 

management. This integrated review is a joint effort of the five federal natural resource management agencies 

and their state, local, and tribal partners that constitute the wildland fire community. The objective is to create an 

integrated strategic vision document for fire management. 

A QFR begins by developing a long-term perspective for consider future conditions and risks that could affect 

fire management for the next several decades. There is also a near- term perspective as the report looks back 

over the past five years (to the 2005 QFR) and reviews and updates the state of fire management programs 

and capabilities. Key natural and social environmental trends are analyzed that may potentially impact fire 

management. From these trends, a strategic course for the future in terms of mission strategies is charted. 

The 2009 QFR benefitted from a research phase featuring panels and forums with fire researchers and social 

and environmental scientists and natural resource specialists. A briefing report resulting from these “strategic 

conversations” was used as the primary source for detailing future environmental trends and identifying the 

following five main driving forces.

The effects of climate change will continue to result in greater probability of longer and bigger fire seasons, 

in more regions in the nation. What has already been realized in the past five years: Shorter, wetter winters and 

warmer drier summers, larger amounts of total fire on the landscape, more large wildfires will persist and possibly 

escalate in an irregular pattern termed asymmetric fire. Fire mitigation efforts must be prepared to cope with 

moving potentially to a 10-12 million annual wildfire acres range over the next five years.

Cumulative drought effects will further stress fuels accumulations. The current drought cycle is expected to 

last for another twenty years. In terms of impact, competition for water in ecosystems, continued problems with 

exotic invasive and insect kill, and faster drying of vegetation will make fuels more flammable and drive fire 

behavior. Drought effects in the Southeast, Southwest, and West will make these areas especially vulnerable in 

terms of fire risk.

There will be continued wildfire risk in the Wildland Urban Interface despite greater public awareness 

and broader involvement of communities. Slower growth and the still-to-be-assessed impacts of the global 

economic recession and rising energy costs may moderate this over the next few years. But overall regional shifts 

in population and the increasing development of former timberland holdings will drive more seasonal recreation 

and full time residency in areas adjacent to the public lands (and in some cases where there are extensive inholdings, inside the public lands). At the tribal, state, and local level, efforts promoting fire prevention (adapting 

community wildfire protection plans, promoting hazardous fuels treatments, and fire education) will continue to 

build. 

Emergency response demands will escalate. The growing impacts of global warming and extreme climatic 

change will also be felt in the likely increase in frequency and devastation of other natural disasters. Floods, 

storms, and other natural disasters are only one set of potentially “major events” where massive government 

emergency response efforts could be required. As FEMA and other agencies and communities involved in 

emergency response have developed their capabilities in this arena, fire management must prepare and expect to 

be called on to play an increasing major role.
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Fire agency budget resources – federal, tribal, state or local – will be strained by increased demands and 

rising costs during a period where government budget revenues will be very tight or falling. The current 

budget environment for federal and partner fire management is at best uncertain and difficult. Recession and 

very volatile energy costs are already putting pressure on all fire management budgets. Federal suppression 

costs have already outstripped budgeted costs five consecutive years. Many states are seeing their reserve funds 

overwhelmed when they have significant wildfires. Coupled with the rising pressure over this past decade to find 

ways to control wildfire costs, budget stress at all levels is likely to further intensify over the next 2-3 years and 

even after the economy recovers.

The QFR outlines four core mission strategies for the future along with two cross-cutting strategies. Above 

everything is fire management’s commitment to safety and risk management. Fire management must expand 

its thinking beyond continuous reinforcement of safety as a function and operational concern. Safety and 

risk management must be strengthened and more systematically incorporated into fire planning, developing safety 

metrics on a level equal with post-fire resource impacts and productivity. New models, new scientific knowledge, 

and emerging information on reliability, safety, and risk management must be promoted and integrated throughout 

all capabilities and levels within fire management. 

The challenge of greater fire, larger fires, and longer fire seasons occurring irregularly within and across regions 

– asymmetric fire – will demand greater flexibility and more agile capabilities within fire management. The first 

QFR core strategy outlines a course forward that moves beyond appropriate management response to 

strategic management response that creates a framework for a multi-phased approach for incident management. 

Elements within strategic management response will include ensuring proactive wildland fire decisions with 

greater transparency and accountability, recalibrating fire planning, and establishing more robust fire outcome 

metrics. Organizationally, strategic management response would involve realigning incident management team 

structures to transform ability to respond, reposition more rapidly, be more scalable to situations, and also place 

fire management response in line with the National Response Framework.

Bringing fire management response more in line with the National Response Framework leads to a core 

strategy for rebalancing emergency response within fire management. While the federal fire agencies must 

continue to make their land stewardship and protection responsibilities the primary objective, a more interactive 

and robust approach enabling fire agencies to work more effectively with the Federal Emergency Management 

Agency (FEMA) and state and local community emergency response forces will be needed. Fire management 

must build beyond the strong training and technical assistance roles in national incident management that are 

already well- established and promote stronger interplay and planning for emergency response efforts of all 

agency and jurisdictional forces -- in effect, extending the reach of emergency response through a total force 

concept. 
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Fire Management

Overarching Commitment to Safety & Risk Management

Core Strategies

Fire Adapted Ecosystems and Wildfire Management

 Future 

Core Strategies

Wildfire Prevention and Mitigation

In the Wildland-Urban Interface

Moving to Strategic 

Management 

Response within 

Asymmetric 

Fire

Reshaping Emergency 

Response 

within Fire Leadership

 Mission 

Strategies 

Fire Governance:

Building a “new” National 

Intergovernmental Wildfire 

Policy Framework

Achieving Fire-Adapted Communities

Cross-Cutting Strategies

Integrated Fuels Management Portfolio

-----------------------------------

Fire Information, Communication & Education: 

New Content, Mediums, and Networks via Web 1.0/Web 2.0.

The 2005 QFR cornerstone mission strategy called for promoting fire-adapted human communities rather than 

escalating protection of communities-at-risk in the wildland- urban interface. The 2009 QFR mission strategy 

takes “Achieving Fire-Adapted Communities” further. Implementation of this core strategy will include steps for 

increasing knowledge and commitment, and building a sense of responsibility among private landowners, home 

owners, the insurance industry, fire districts, local governments and other key players in interface communities for 

wildfire prevention and mitigation. 

To accomplish this, the QFR outlines a core strategy calling for reaffirming fire governance, essentially 

building a “new” national intergovernmental wildfire policy framework. Such a framework would first clarify 

federal, tribal, state and local roles, responsibilities, and authorities for wildland-urban interface protection and 

then realign federal, tribal, state and local roles, responsibilities, and authorities for interface fire protection (to 

include suppression, prevention, mitigation, and education). 

Strategy elements to extend the reach and deepen the base for Achieving Fire-Adapted Communities 

will also be needed. The premise is that all partners recognize a general set of common operating precepts: 

namely, fulfilling pre-fire mitigation, defensible space, and individual responsibilities, applicable regulations, 

and providing a robust local response capacity must be a reality. Other key steps include building community 

defensible space or fuels reduction zones in the interface as an essential component of a larger integrated fuels 

management portfolio, enabling (where appropriate) “leave-early-or-stay-and-defend policies” for property 

owners, and recalibrating public expectations with a broader set of fire outcome and risk metrics. 

The QFR details two cross-cutting strategies that are critical to all fire management efforts. Establishing 

an integrated fuels management portfolio would transform fuels management from a project/output 

perspective to a larger investment strategy in support of greater land management priorities and multijurisdictional goals. The portfolio would support multiple programs – starting with the fuels reduction zones 

in fire-adapted communities and reaching efforts to treat larger landscapes in wilderness areas and public lands 

between the wildland-urban interface and the wilderness.
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A final crosscutting strategy outlines directions for creating new content, mediums, and networks for 

information sharing and public education using web 1.0 and web 2.0 internet capabilities. While there are 

numerous applications, the QFR details several strategy elements to include rethinking public information on 

fire risk, prevention, and fire safety (“TheFireChannel.gov”), enhancing collaboration and building partnerships 

through social networks (“MyFirecommunity.net) and revitalizing environmental stewardship education on public 

lands and wildfire (“Fire-opedia”).

Two closing sections in the report examine requisite capabilities, workforce and capital asset requirements, and 

operating systems and developing technologies. Current workforce capability faces a number of challenges 

ranging from high rates of use and an upward trending growth rate in preparedness levels to optimizing training 

investments and a growing need for succession planning. There are significant needs for capital modernization, 

especially in aviation. Strategic sourcing must be refined as fire management seeks to build partnerships within 

the contracting community that clearly advance reliability and safety. Developments of new technologies to 

expand the capabilities within fire management decision support must continue. 

Above all, fire management must continue to recognize that its capability to manage in its highly dynamic future 

environment rests on its capacity and resolve to operate as interagency-cooperator fire service working seamlessly 

across jurisdictional or organizational boundaries, leveraging the existing capabilities of partners, contractors and 

the public to help accomplish the mission. 
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I. Introduction: Wildland Fire in the First Decade of the 21st Century

In 2004, the U.S. Forest Service, the four U. S. Department of the Interior (DOI) agencies and their state, local, 

and tribal partners that constitute the wildland fire community, chartered the first Quadrennial Fire Review 

(QFR). Like its predecessor, this 2009 QFR is designed as a strategic evaluative process that develops an internal 

assessment of capabilities of current programs and resources in comparison to future needs for fire management. 

In terms of time frame, projections of future conditions and risks potentially affecting fire management are longterm (a 10-to-20 year timeframe), while strategies for new mission requirements and building new capabilities are 

near-term, defined in a 4-to-5 year period. 

In projecting how fire management is likely to change in the future, the QFR first seeks to interpret how fire 

management has changed in the past decade. And much is different since the inception of the National Fire Plan, 

when, after the fire season of 2000 nearly 2 billion dollars in new fire funding (an effective fire budget increase of 

90%), was provided for the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior for fire management. 

As the 2005 QFR noted, there has been a significant increase in the amount and cost of wildfire suppression 

efforts as a result of dramatic changes in weather conditions, fuel build up and growth in the Wildland Urban 

Interface (WUI). The 2006 and 2007 fire seasons set modern historical records for both suppression costs and 

wildfire acres. As Figure 1 illustrates, suppression costs have continued to rise over the decade. 

The gap between appropriated funds for fire suppression and actual costs also continues to widen. Emergency 

transfers of resource management and other funds to support fire suppression impacts agencies’ resource programs 

to accomplish land management goals and stresses relationships with external partners. Supplemental funding 

of the federal wildland fire suppression program has been an annual requirement in each of the last five years, 

with annual supplemental funding ranging from $200 million to over three quarters of a billion dollars. This 

supplemental funding now represents 27% of the total suppression expenditures – just under a half billion dollars. 

Rising wildfire suppression costs have also impacted state and local budgets. As an example, the lightning fire 

siege in Northern California in 2008 and the previous year’s fall fire siege in Southern California pushed that 

state’s fire fighting expenditures to nearly $400 million, requiring a drawdown of $310 million from the state’s 

reserve fund. 
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Figure 1 

Source: National Interagency Fire Center – December 2008

Looking Back: Wildfire Costs, Programs, and Policy Developments

Historically, fire management has been event-driven, but the case might be made that fire management is now 

increasingly cost-driven. The 2005 QFR report covered in some depth the major changes in wildland fire policy 

and fire, fuel, and restoration programs that were reshaped by the National Fire Plan. Since then, the emphasis, 

especially among federal fire management agencies, has been on implementation of those plans and policies and 

of course, cost management. While there have been additional major studies, reviews, and reports both in and 

outside of fire management, they have focused mostly on ascertaining how much progress has been made and 

proposing recommendations for greater program effectiveness. This section provides a brief update on program, 

policy, resource, and systems developments before addressing future trends. 

 

Cost Management 

While several policy-oriented reviews were completed on escalating wildfire cost issues prior to the 2005 QFR, 

the focus has shifted to programmatic and specific incident assessments. Fire management placed increasing 

emphasis on suppression costs at both unit and national levels. Incident business advisors are assigned to units to 

monitor outlays and look for cost efficiencies. Incident teams are asked to report on cost savings measures they 

are implementing during suppression operations. The Forest Service conducts separate regional reviews where 

internal teams review costs and incident management operations for all fires over $5 million. In 2007, senior 

executives were sent out to larger wildfires as the chief’s principle representatives to assess suppression operations 

and cost issues – and reinforce the message of the importance of both risk and cost management from agency 

leadership.

2

Figure 1

Source: National Interagency Fire Center – December 2008 

Looking Back: Wildfire Costs, Programs, and Policy Developments 

Historically, fire management has been event-driven, but the case might be made that fire 

management is now increasingly cost-driven. The 2005 QFR report covered in some 

depth the major changes in wildland fire policy and fire, fuel, and restoration programs 

that were reshaped by the National Fire Plan. Since then, the emphasis, especially among 

federal fire management agencies, has been on implementation of those plans and 

policies and of course, cost management. While there have been additional major studies, 

reviews, and reports both in and outside of fire management, they have focused mostly on 

ascertaining how much progress has been made and proposing recommendations for 

greater program effectiveness. This section provides a brief update on program, policy, 

resource, and systems developments before addressing future trends.

Cost Management

While several policy-oriented reviews were completed on escalating wildfire cost issues 

prior to the 2005 QFR, the focus has shifted to programmatic and specific incident 

assessments. Fire management placed increasing emphasis on suppression costs at both 

unit and national levels. Incident business advisors are assigned to units to monitor 

outlays and look for cost efficiencies. Incident teams are asked to report on cost savings 

measures they are implementing during suppression operations. The Forest Service 

conducts separate regional reviews where internal teams review costs and incident 

management operations for all fires over $5 million. In 2007, senior executives were sent 
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Beginning in FY 2004, the requirement to conduct “independent” reviews of fires exceeding $10 million in 

federal expenditures was added to wildland fire appropriations language. The number of fires exceeding $10 

million increased from 6 in FY 2004-2005, to 20 in FY 2006, and 27 in FY 2007 (and an estimated 32 in 2008, 

though yet to be determined). These large, costly wildfires accounted for federal and non-federal expenditures of 

$500 million in FY 2006, $600 million in FY 2007, and now about a billion dollars estimated for FY 2008. All but 

three of the more than 50 fires since FY 2004 with federal expenditures over $10 million were Forest Service fires. 

The 2004 and 2005 reviews (The Ferraro Reports) were conducted by a panel of retired Forest Service and 

other research experts while the 2006 and 2007 independent reviews were conducted by an independent panel 

of national and international experts outside the federal fire community (The Brookings Reports). All four of the 

panel assessment reports confirmed that there was no fiscal malfeasance or inadequate financial actions. 

What the panel reports did point to in terms of recommendations was the need for greater currency and linkage 

between fire management plans and suppression strategies, replacement of the wildfire situation analysis process 

that consistently underestimated fire outcomes and costs, and new approaches for moving and reshaping incident 

management teams and aviation assets on and off of wildfires, among others. The wildland fire situation analysis 

will eventually be replaced by the Wildland Fire Decision Support System as part of the modified Interagency 

Strategy for the Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Policy. The 2006 and 2007 panels’ reports noted that 

cost controls through the use of incident business advisors and cost savings reporting by teams, while helpful in 

providing proper “fiscal vigilance,” had marginal impact at best on fire suppression costs at these higher levels of 

scale. 

In addition to these efforts, there were separate reviews by the USDA Office of Inspector General and the U. S. 

Government Accountability Office (GAO) on fire cost containment. The Office of the Inspector General issued 

several reports reviewing audits and assessments of wildfire suppression costs. They found rising suppression 

costs were driven primarily by suppression efforts tied to protecting private property, and recommended, in 

addition to more cost accountability measures, the expansion of wildland fire use and more prevention efforts in 

the form of building codes and ordinances for WUI communities. Aviation safety was addressed in one review. 

While the Inspector General concluded that significant progress had been made, the review stated that much more 

needed to be done regarding airworthiness to ensure safety in aerial firefighting.

GAO also conducted several studies of rising suppression costs in this interval. While its reviews recognized the 

value of specific initiatives and new management system developments, GAO emphasized higher-level needs for 

more strategic emphasis on reducing fuels and increasing wildfire prevention efforts. GAO called for redeveloping 

the cohesive strategy for fuels management (prepared initially in 1999), ensuring more strategic selection of 

fuels reduction projects, and establishing wildfire suppression management goals that included specific and 

measureable strategies for containing costs. 
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Fire Policy and Program Planning 

The Federal Wildland Fire Policy has clearly identified the objective of integrating fire as a critical natural 

process into land management and resource activities to protect, maintain, and enhance resources, and, as nearly 

as possible, allowed to function in its natural role. Achieving this objective requires balancing risk – protecting 

and enhancing resource values while maintaining public and firefighter safety. Expanding the capability of fire 

managers and agency administrators to use fire to meet resource objectives is a critical step to restoring fire 

adapted ecosystems. 

As a component of land and resource management, the Federal Wildland Fire Policy, adopted in 1995, stated, 

“Fire, as a critical natural process, will be integrated into land and resource management plans and activities on a 

landscape scale, and across agency boundaries. Response to wildland fire is based on ecological, social, and legal 

consequences of fire. The circumstances under which a fire occurs, and the likely consequences on firefighter 

and public safety and welfare, natural and cultural resources, and values to be protected dictate the appropriate 

management response to fire.” This policy was reaffirmed and guidance supporting implementation of this policy 

was issued in 2001. 

In 2008 the agencies, with agreement by the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, modified the “Interagency 

Strategy for the Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy” direction issued in 2003 to 

improve opportunities for field managers to implement federal wildand fire policy. Revised implementation 

guidance moves to two kinds of wildland fire: prescribed fire (planned ignitions), and wildfire (unplanned 

ignitions), removing the formal distinction between wildland fire use (fires managed to achieve resource benefits 

and suppression fires (managed to minimize damage). This signficant revision is designed to increase managers’ 

ability to respond to changing incident conditions and firefighting capability and to implement tactics and 

strategies supporting public safety and resource management objectives. 

A “Cohesive Fuels Treatment Strategy” was released in 2006 by the federal fire agencies. This strategy addressed 

the need to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildland fires by reducing fuels build-up in forests and woodlands and 

by reducing threats by flammable invasive species in rangelands and grasslands. The strategy focused on four 

principles: prioritization, coordination, collaboration, and accountability, and emphasized creating effective fuel 

treatments across landscapes. 

In 2006, the federal fire agencies, along with representatives of the Western Governors Association, updated the 

Implementation Plan for the “10-year Comprehensive Strategy.” While many of the action objectives set forth in 

the initial plan had been accomplished, progress was uneven. This effort was notable in part because the nonfederal partners played key leadership roles in establishing goals and also in promoting and reporting community 

assistance efforts. The updated plan included revised and additional performance measures and implementation 

tasks developed collaboratively among all partners.
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Fire Resource Planning and Risk Assessment 

Considerable progress has been made in advancing new systems and decision support processes for fire 

management. Prominent among systems developments is LANDFIRE, also known as the Landscape Fire and 

Resource Management Planning Tools Project, a multi-partner project producing consistent and comprehensive 

maps and data describing vegetation, wildland fuel, and fire regimes across the United States. Data products 

include layers of vegetation composition and structure, surface and canopy fuel characteristics, and historical 

fire regimes that are designed to facilitate national and regional-level strategic planning and reporting of 

fire management activities. A second system using LANDFIRE data, the Hazardous Fuels Allocation and 

Prioritization System, allows managers to evaluate and prioritize fuels reduction funding using natural resource, 

values-at-risk, and restoration opportunity criteria.

Linked to LANDFIRE are efforts by two major multi-state wildland fire risk assessment processes. Under the 

aegis of the Southern Group of State Foresters, the Southern Wildfire Risk Assessment for the 13 Southern 

states is now operational. This system, with software, provides a federal, state and local unit land manager or 

community a clearer picture of what the overall potential is for wildland fire and any associated problems. A 

“West-Wide Wildfire Risk Assessment” for 17 western states is currently in the request for proposal process. Both 

the southern and the western risk assessments are designed to be populated with LANDFIRE data in the future. 

Two other major system developments rely on LANDFIRE data as a nationally consistent starting point for 

analysis. Fire Program Analysis (FPA) was designed to provide interagency investment analysis of initial response 

and prevention organizations, hazardous fuel treatments, and large fire suppression. FPA outputs, when complete, 

would display trade-offs between program components relative to performance metrics and be utilized in fire 

planning, budget formulation and execution. FPA is being deployed in FY 2009 to support the 2011 budget 

process. 

While still under revision, in 2008 the modeling systems programs for FPA were released to the agencies for data 

population. In a 2008 report on FPA, the GAO noted that FPA would be able to provide the foundation for a single 

framework for the five federal agencies to develop their budget requests and allocate funds by analyzing needed 

firefighting assets across agency jurisdictions. The report also noted that FPA is also likely to help the federal 

agencies achieve another key objective in analyzing the most important fire management activities: preparedness, 

fire suppression, and fuel reduction. 

In addition, another systems effort includes the development of tools to support the development of extendedduration wildfires. The Wildland Fire Decision Support Systems tools include Fire Spread Probability (FSPRO) 

and Rapid Assessment of Values At Risk (RAVAR). FSPRO is a spatial model that calculates the probability of 

fire spread from a current fire perimeter or ignition point for a specified time period. FSPRO, through the use of 

high end computers, can calculate fire spread probabilities out into the future. Projections can range from 7 to 90 

days compared to current “normal” projections for a 10 –14 day period. RAVAR is an economic model that uses 

the fire spread probability output from FSPRO to provide value assessments relative to the potential of a wildfire 

reaching identified areas of concern threatened by the fire’s spread. It currently provides estimated monetary 

values for significant community assets and on a more limited level, assessments of non-monetary values such as 

critical habitat and cultural heritage sites. Both of these tools have been fully tested and are now being deployed 

on the most significant fire situations. 
6

QFR

Looking Forward – Emerging Threats and Risks 

The 2005 QFR’s prediction that the United States could be moving to a new level of increased fire activity and 

larger wildfires has been realized all too quickly. Wildland fire activity, as measured by acres impacted, had been 

increasingly consistently since the mid-1980s. But since the fire season of 2000, (then touted as the “fire season 

of the century”) total wildfire acreage that year has been eclipsed by subsequent fire activity from 2004 to 2008. 

Wildfire acres reached a new modern day record of 9.8 million acres in 2006. 

Fire activity now is being compared in scale to the wildland fire seasons in the early 1900s that burned large 

acreages in the West and Northern Midwest. The 10-year moving average has now doubled from 3.78 million 

wildfire acres in the 1990s to 7.15 million acres in the 2000-2008 period. Table 1 in two parts that follow shows 

wildfire activity (number of fires and wildfire acres) for the five-year period 2004 to 2008. Total wildfire acres on 

all lands exceeded the 8 million acre level four years out of five. 

There is also a separate breakout for geographic areas – which displays the high variability within fire activity 

patterns when compared to five year averages. Wildfire acreage for the geographic areas except for the East and 

South exceed 20% or 200% of the regional 5-year averages the majority of years. The Eastern Great Basin is a 

superb example -- two of the five years, fire acres are below 150,000, one year is more than double, and two years 

are basically the same as the 1 million acre five-year average for that geographic area. These levels of variability 

or the lack of predictable patterns are part of a construct – what this QFR terms asymmetric – or irregular fire

-- for the shape of future wildfire management environment. 

Risk levels also continue to increase because of the growth of population and housing in the Wildland Urban 

Interface and Intermix. (While definitions vary, interface is generally refers to areas with communities or basic 

level of houses units near wildlands, while intermix has fewer houses and more vegetation). While conversion of 

unpopulated forest and rangeland to housing in the WUI will undoubtedly be affected by the national economic 

housing and financial crises for the next several years, the fact remains that housing growth rates in the WUI have 

been nearly triple the rates of increase outside the WUI. 

Further, the intermix, where housing is more likely to be outside of fire districts and community jurisdiction 

boundaries, has consistently sustained a faster rate of growth within the overall expansion of the WUI. The fact 

that in 2007 only 3,000 homes in the U.S. were damaged or destroyed by wildfires is rather remarkable given the 

number of structures that are in the WUI and at risk and the level of large wildfire activity. (In 2003, over 4,000 

homes were destroyed in California alone). 
7

QFR

Table 1A U.S. Annual Number of Wildfires & Acres

Fires*

USFS

193 mil

Acres

BIA

56 mil

Acres

BLM

264 mil

Acres

FWS

96 mil

Acres

NPS

84 mil

Acres

State/

Other Totals Totals

2004 8,606 3,661 2,906 381 490 49,834 65,878

2005 7,331 5,127 2,655 518 395 50,727 66,753

2006 10,403 6,768 3,848 524 537 74,305 96,385

2007 8,486 4,593 2,613 396 489 69,128 85,705

2008 6,477 4,317 1,906 412 396 44,804 58,312

Acres

USFS BIA BLM FWS NPS State/

Other Totals Totals

2004 551,966 71,292 1,305,707 2,096,403 42,352 4,026,811 8,094,531

2005 781,148 194,757 3,591,721 1,842,177 128,761 2,150,825 8,689,389

2006 1,896,071 376,824 2,406,622 236,746 73,566 4,883,916 9,873,745

2007 2,835,577 266,593 2,021,009 501,038 102,459 3,601,369 9,328,045

2008 1,232,649 155,808 333,803 94,159 84,684 2,571,329 4,472,432

*Does Not Include Prescribed Fire

Source: National Interagency Fire Center – December 2008

States and local communities are also acutely aware of this increase in risk. Many more communities have 

adopted community wildfire protection plans that recognize the increased probability that more houses and people 

will find themselves threatened by wildfire. 
8

QFR

Table 1B Number of Wildfire and Acres in Geographic Areas 2004-2008

Larger wildfires will continue to have a major impact on fire suppression strategy and cost. The 2005 QFR 

report predicted that there would be a significant increase in both the amount of fire activity and the number of 

large wildfires, even if the fire agencies sustained their initial attack success rate at over 95%. This trend has 

been realized. Since 1999, there have been 242 recorded large wildfires in the United States exceeding 50,000 

acres compared to 119 in the previous two decades. In terms of cumulative impact, another way to assess the 

significance of these large wildfires would be to note that from 2004 to 2008, they accounted for 18.9 million 

acres out of 40.5 million acres or 46.7% of all wildfire acres reported. Figure 2 illustrates:

2004 2005 2006 2007

2008*

As of Dec 

5th

5 year

Average

(2003-

2007)

Eastern

Area

11,869

101,398

13,189

87,423

14,483

87,423

12,783

250,052

11,016

66,221

13,442

164,869

Southern

Area

28,716

462,797

29,436

577,064

48,632

2,632,358

45,659

1,865,655

43,379

2,306,110

33,839

1,166,041

Rocky

Mountains

2,044

52,267

3,338

86,213

5,447

658,782

3,548

161,944

2,088

232,946

4,099

228,055

Eastern

Great 

Basin

2,286

89,187

2,158

953,362

3,202

1,244,452

2,482

2,411,428

1,654

140,705

2,615

1,010,861

Western

Great 

Basin

954

39,791

798

1,032,114

1,274

1,348,871

888

890,171

451

71,930

942

665,705

Northern

Rockies

2,973

38,430

1,931

129,066

4,273

1,166,476

3,368

1,084,569

2,595

223,372

3,287

660,000

Northern

California

4,248

150,305

3,196

63,075

4,624

321,653

3,667

208,548

4,701

934,081

4,099

177,124

Southern

California

4,168

92,408

4,053

141,003

3,575

367,096

5,431

899,592

5,101

395,693

4,312

431,585

South

West

3,553

302,681

5,222

838,777

5,731

761,777

3,599

167,855

2,925

562,108

4,493

469,309

North

West

3,943

122,638

2,825

341,143

4,836

956,082

3,832

863,214

2,972

262,541

3,882

528,758

Alaska 707

6,645,978

607

4,440,149

308

266,266

448

525,017

337

62,647

504

2,487,348

Source: National Interagency Coordination Center Annual Report 2007 & 2008 (in draft)
9

QFR

Figure 2

Source: National Interagency Fire Center – December 2008

Driving Forces for Future Change 

In looking to the future, there is now consensus from nearly all research quarters about the cumulative effects 

of accelerating climate change, accumulating biomass, and long- term drought effects on the wildland fire 

environment. While there are differences about the magnitude and timeframes associated with these changes, 

there is broad agreement in the direction wildfire and ecosystems are headed for next several decades. 

Effects of Climate Change

Effects of climate change will certainly vary from year to year and from one geographical area to another. 

This variability will create uncertainty in the amount and location of wildfire acres, but there is a high 

likelihood that wildland fire activity will exceed the established 8-10 million wildfire acre plateau reached 

over the past five years and move up into a new 10-12 million wildfire acre range by the start of this coming 

decade. 

9

1999, there have been 242 recorded large wildfires in the United States exceeding 50,000 

acres compared to 119 in the previous two decades. In terms of cumulative impact, 

another way to assess the significance of these large wildfires would be to note that from 

2004 to 2008, they accounted for 18.9 million acres out of 40.5 million acres or 46.7% of 

all wildfire acres reported. Figure 2 illustrates: 

0

50

100

150

200

250

1979-1988 1989-1998 1999-2008

Federal Large Wildfires 1979-2008 (Over 50,000 Acres)

50-100K Acres

100-250K Acres

Over 250K Acres

Total Number of Fires

Source: National Interagency Fire Center – December 2008 

Driving Forces for Future Change

In looking to the future, there is now consensus from nearly all research quarters about 

the cumulative effects of accelerating climate change, accumulating biomass, and longterm drought effects on the wildland fire environment. While there are differences about 

the magnitude and timeframes associated with these changes, there is broad agreement in 

the direction wildfire and ecosystems are headed for next several decades. 

Effects of Climate Change 

Effects of climate change will certainly vary from year to year and from one geographical 

area to another. This variability will create uncertainty in the amount and location of 

wildfire acres, but there is a high likelihood that wildland fire activity will exceed the 

established 8-10 million wildfire acre plateau reached over the past five years and move 

up into a new 10-12 million wildfire acre range by the start of this coming decade. 
10

QFR

Climate change will worsen the effects of extended droughts in various locations around North America. 

The Southwest, and Southeast regions of the United States are expected to be impacted even more severely 

by the effects of the long-term drought cycle than they have been since the late 1990s. Additionally, large, 

costly and damaging wildland fires will be more likely to occur in geographic areas that haven’t traditionally 

experienced such events, such as the Midwestern, Eastern and Southeastern parts of the US.

The warming and drying effects of climate change will also tend to increase the period of the year in which 

wildland fires occur. Studies already indicate that wetter and warmer winters followed by faster snowmelt in 

the West have expanded the fire season horizon. 

Research has also confirmed that fire seasons are lengthening, indicating that 30 days or more should be 

added to the start of the traditional fire season and possibly at the end. 

Insect and disease mortality on forest lands have contributed to the hazardous fuels problem in the United 

States. While good historical data is lacking – the 10-year trend in mortality due to declining forest health 

since 1997 shows increasing impact. Between 1997 and 2001, the five-year trend ranged between 2 to 3 

million acres. From 2002 to 2007, the mortality range was between 5 and 12 million acres, with the average 

at 8 million compared to a 2.5 million acre average previously. Closely related to this factor will be impacts 

on landscape restoration, particularly when there is a conflict between native and invasive species. Post-fire 

restoration budgets in recent years have reached record levels.

Finally, the potential impact of new legislation and agency objectives on CO2

 emissions and carbon effects 

on global warming must be factored in. Wildland fire emissions are currently excluded from CO2

 emission 

calculations, but it is not yet clear where states will be on CO2

 emissions and wildfire suppression objectives. 

Cumulative Drought Effects and Fuels 

Since the adoption of National Fire Plan and the commitment of nearly $350 million annually in program 

funding, federal fuel treatments have grown to meet a annual target level of 3 million acres. This target was 

further amended in 2003 by requiring that 50% of the acres treated be in the WUI. Fuels treatments are just 

one of the options in the land manager’s toolbox to provide for healthy lands and protected communities. The 

fuels program provides a significant level of accomplishment toward the long-term goal of fulfilling landmanagement objectives while furthering the establishment of a system of healthy lands providing economic 

and recreational opportunities and protection for adjacent communities. 

The resulting accomplishment has been the cumulative treatment of nearly 30 million acres on public land 

since 2001, as Table 2 shows. The table includes those acres designated wildland fire use as part of the fire 

category. The wildland fire use category over the past five years has amounted to over 1.4 million – 463,000 

acres for Department of the Interior agencies and 970,000 acres for Forest Service.

Fuels treatment in the United States, which averaged around 3 million acres per year by all federal agencies 

since 2001, has now increased to over 4 million acres with the inclusion of wildfire acres that produce 

resource benefits in the calculations. But even this level cannot compete with current average annual levels 

of 8-10 millions acres of wildfires that are occurring annually, much less meet the 10-12 million acres level 

of scale predicted for the next decade. 
11

QFR

As the 2005 QFR report noted, the fuels program has been outpaced by the continued growth in biomass and 

wildfire activity, further impacted by global warming factors. Fuel accumulation is further affected by drought 

which is making fuels more flammable and increasing the risk of greater fire intensity and faster fire rate spread. 

Most researchers assume that the nation is still in the first decade of what is expected to be a 25-30 year drought 

cycle. 

In areas where fuels treatment programs are established, continued treatments to maintain past gains are critical to 

meeting long term goals. However, the ability to increase current levels of treatments, particularly through the use 

of prescribed fire, is limited to certain geographic areas and fuel types. The Southeast has traditionally accounted 

for more than a third of all treated acres, and is best positioned to continue and potentially expand its program. 

The Southwest, Great Plains, and areas of the Midwest are also poised to expand treatment programs in the future. 

The capability to significantly increase treatments in much of the West is limited, even if the hurdles of funding, 

smoke management and air quality, planning, legal concerns, and operational windows are overcome.

The development and implementation of new strategic management responses that provide enhanced flexibility 

and promote increased utilization of available opportunities will provide significant potential to increase total 

acres treated through the management of wildfire for resource benefit and long-term community protection. 

Facilitation of these strategies will increase treatments by a third or more, but are contingent on public acceptance. 

Even with increased public understanding that fire is essential to long term healthy lands and protected 

communities, the required planning, preparation and policy changes necessary for widespread use of these new 

strategies will require time to develop, and will still not be available in many areas of the country due to public 

health and safety concerns.

Essentially, the impacts of these two facets of fire management are an order of magnitude apart with wildfire 

essentially “treating” ecosystems at a much higher rate. While planned fuel treatments are being outpaced by 

wildfire, it remains critical to maintain existing fuel treatment programs in order to maintain gains already 

achieved, promote agency capacity to accomplish such work and to place fuels treatments strategically in 

conjunction with fire activity. Fire research efforts to determine fuels treatment effectiveness and numerous 

examples where wildfire activity stopped when it reached a treated area or where burn severity was significantly 

reduced due to prior treatments will help land and fire managers realize greater return on fuels investments and 

improve fire suppression strategies on the ground. 
12

QFR

Table 2 USFS & Department of Interior Fuels Treatment Acres – 2004-2008

Wildland Urban Interface Non-Wildland Urban Interface Totals

Acres by 

Year Fire Mechanical Other Fire Mechanical Other

2004

USFS 1,163,000 436,000 101,000 491,000 357,000 13,000 2,561,000

DOI 250,000 294,000 16,000 572,000 299,000 200,000 1,631,000

Total 1,413,000 730,000 117,000 1,063,000 656,000 213,000 4,192,000

2005

USFS 1,044,000 515,000 99,000 688,000 343,000 33,000 2,722,000

DOI 284,000 276,000 49,000 580,000 233,000 180,000 1,620,000

Total 1,328,000 791,000 148,000 1,286,000 576,000 213,000 4,342,000

2006

USFS 812,000 683,000 95,000 580,000 356,000 21,000 2,547,000

DOI 243,000 236,000 108,000 420,000 229,000 220,000 1,456,000

Total 1,055,000 919,000 203,000 1,000,000 585,000 241,000 4,003,000

2007

USFS 1,018,000 392,000 244,000 858,000 504,000 11,000 3,027,000

DOI 332,000 244,000 275,000 663,000 168,000 105,000 1,787,000

Total 1,350,000 636,000 519,000 1,521,000 672,000 116,000 4,814,000

2008

USFS 1,114,000 808,000 19,000 689,000 397,000 11,000 3,038,000

DOI 384,000 233,000 57,000 521,000 131,000 340,000 1,630,000

Total 1,462,000 1,041,000 76,000 1,210,000 528,000 351,000 4,668,000

2004-

2008 

Totals

USFS 4,133,000 2,442,000 314,000 2,448,000 1,453,000 78,000 10,868,000

DOI 1,125,000 1.039,000 230,000 2,111,000 892,000 940,000 6,337,000

Totals 5,258,000 3,481,000 544,000 4,559,000 2,345,000 1,018,000 17,205,000

2001-

2008

USFS 7,293,000 3,168,000 572,000 4,705,000 2,140,000 90,000 17,968,000

DOI 1.832,000 1,641,000 625,000 4,395,000 1,422,000 1,255,000 11,170,000

Totals 9,125,000 4,809,000 1,197,000 9,100,000 3,562,000 1,345,000 29,138,000

Source: Interagency Fuels Report –NFPORS Data 2008

Continued Risk in the Wildland Urban Interface

The 2005 QFR Report noted that demographic shifts, notably new population and housing, toward the WUI would 

continue to accelerate in the first decade of the new century. This reflects both regional shifts in population and 

the increasing attraction of owning property for both seasonal recreation and full time residency in areas adjacent 

to public land (and in some cases where there are extensive in-holdings). This trend has greatly complicated the 

mission of fire management in protecting communities at risk from wildfires.
13

QFR

For the next decade, social scientists and demographers are predicting a somewhat slower rate of growth in the 

WUI. This slower growth rate is already being realized with the double impacts of higher gasoline and energy 

costs and the national recession and financial credit crises. Nonetheless, more growth will come on top of the 15 

to17 million homes built in the interface since the 1990s. Much of this increase is in the West, where regional 

population growth already exceeds national growth rates and is on track to exceed 80 million people, or 24% of 

the Unites States population, by 2020.

Economic factors (now dramatically worse and more volatile than predicted) are expected to curb WUI growth 

greatly in the short run and somewhat less in the longer term, as effects of falling housing pricing and home 

equity in the current economic reversal are felt over the next several years. The higher cost of gasoline and utility 

costs may also limit new residential development. This will vary greatly by geographic region but growth in the 

WUI is likely to mount when better economic conditions resume. These resulting demographic trends in the WUI, 

especially in high-growth areas including the Southwest, Southeast and Southern California, will increase the 

probability of large wildland fires becoming significant WUI fires. 

In several regions of the country, ownership of large timber holdings has shifted from timber companies to timber 

investment management organizations and real estate investment trusts. For most of these tracts, there is little 

financial incentive for these new owners to invest in management practices such as thinning or prescribed burning. 

Fire is typically viewed as an undesirable event that must be controlled by federal, state, or local firefighters. 

As more studies are being conducted of the needs and expectations of residents in the WUI, two factors are 

already clear. The first involves aversion to smoke. Smoke will continue to be a major issue, particularly in terms 

of health, as research shows that a number of households in the WUI have health issues related to air pollutants. 

This is also true of smaller communities and cities as well as the WUI, which may be subject to smoke effects 

from prolonged wildland fires. Secondly, the Interface and the Intermix will further diverge with more home 

construction and settlement away from new and old communities which will create a higher proportion of 

homes in the Intermix rather than the Interface. The larger growth in the Intermix will present challenges for fire 

management programs requiring some organized community element.

All communities must develop and maintain growth management plans that specifically address the WUI 

issues. This is paramount in designing and maintaining new growth in the WUI by use of modern wildland fire 

and building codes. Key to the solution to the WUI problem will be property owners’ support including their 

willingness to retrofit existing structures with fire resistant building material.

Current efforts to promote fire prevention in communities will continue. More communities will adopt 

Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP). Transforming federal fire management plans and linking them to 

CWPPs to promote a collaborative approach to fire prevention, mitigation, and response is an excellent strategy 

if implemented locally. Without local involvement and commitments, community planning can become irrelevant 

and as such may not be appropriate for all areas of the country. The challenge will be moving them from compacts 

or agreements to commitments backed up by funding and program investments. 

Future budget outlooks, even for those states with increased population growth, does not bode well for more 

self-financed fuels management and fire prevention programs. Indeed, the expectation that the national economic 

recession may be prolonged has already slashed state and local revenues and stretched reserves to the breaking 

point. 
14

QFR

Despite these economic reversals, community expectations are changing. There is more awareness of the risks and 

the limitations of what any government entity can do to suppress wildfires. Indeed, very recent trends are likely 

to escalate in the media coverage of the WUI fires that shift the emphasis to personal risk as opposed to public 

responsibility for resident decisions to live in potentially dangerous fire zones. Fire management can likewise 

expect to contend with property owner expectations shifting toward increasing ability to stay and defend property 

by constructing or retrofitting homes with fire-resistant construction and undergoing training providing an option 

to not evacuate. Community attitudes are already shifting to increasing support of prescribed fire and thinning 

programs for fuels reduction. Likewise, community attitudes about more flexible suppression strategies will be 

more supportive or at least realistic as the level of fire activity increases.

Attitudes toward protection of private property will continue to change with the intervention of insurance 

company contracted resources providing asset protection activities such as foaming or removing fuels near 

structures prior to fire reaching the area. This privatization facet will challenge fire managers. Other areas of 

privatization, such as contracted incident support or management teams, will create both opportunities and a new 

business model.

Escalating Emergency Response Demands

The last five years has also left little doubt that large scale disasters are going to be more significant in the 21st

century. Globally, the interval between QFRs has already seen two devastating disasters – the December 2004 

Indian Ocean earthquake that triggered a series of tsunamis that killed more than 225,000 people in 11 countries 

and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that killed more than 75,000 people in China. 

While natural disaster activity in the U.S. has been much less deadly over the same period, it still has been of 

great impact. Fire management was significantly involved in the 2004 Florida hurricanes response and even 

more so in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005. At one point in 2005, the estimate of the level of engagement of 

national incident teams in emergency recovery was approaching 40% of dedicated work hours. Another metric 

for gauging the growing significance of emergency response in past years is the increasing number of national 

and state disaster declarations. According to FEMA reports, there were 74 state disaster declarations in 2008 

with 51 of them fire management assistance declarations. Since an emergency declaration is needed for FEMA

reimbursement for tribal, state and local governments, the increase in disaster declarations is perhaps a trailing 

edge indicator. Even so, there have been 500 disaster declarations in the states since 2000 out of a total of 1,808 

declarations since the system was established in 1953.

While natural disasters are the major category of emergency response and recovery incident that fire management 

must continually prepare to be involved in, there are other scenarios of national disaster situations that potentially 

would involve response requirements and place major stress and strain on current incident management capacity. 

These include: global disaster response (pandemic flu); large scale accident response (Exxon Valdez, Three Mile 

Island, massive bridge failures, levee or dam breaks); natural disaster response (hurricane, earthquake, volcano, 

coastal flooding); zoonotics disaster response (Exotic Newcastle Disease, Mad Cow outbreak); and, attack/threat 

based disaster response (radiological release, anthrax attack, pyroterrorism, bio-terrorism, eco-terrorism, weapons 

of mass destruction). 
15

QFR

While the probability of each of these threats is thankfully small, the potential impacts are devastating and long 

lasting. Each assumes correctly that some form of extensive fire community response would be involved from 

immediate emergency response to longer- term disaster recovery. Fire management must ensure that it is prepared 

to fulfill its responsibilities under FEMA’s Emergency Support Function IV and continue to train and provide 

technical assistance to build capacity both within the federal agencies and for other agencies. 

Fiscal Stress and Budget Realities 

This QFR adds emerging government budgetary stress as a fifth driving force. A quadrennial review, by definition, 

builds in certain basic budgeting assumptions for the next four year interval. As Figure 1 illustrates, the rising 

cost in fire suppression is already a major factor for federal fire agencies. As might be expected given the rapid 

increase in wildfire activity, the 10-year rolling average suppression funding formula currently used has resulted 

in underfunding for suppression activity for the most recent years in the last decade. This in turn has resulted 

in almost annual additional Congressional and agency emergency financial intervention to remedy the growing 

shortfall. 

The use of supplemental funding has had another budgetary impact. Between 1999 and 2006, more than $3 billion 

was transferred from other DOI and Forest Service program accounts to support fire suppression. While this “fire 

borrowing” has generally been replaced, it has placed another source of financial strain on other agency programs. 

A 2004 GAO report documented numerous examples of project cancellations and delays, strained partner 

relationships, and management disruptions attributable to these fire transfers. 

Future budgetary stress will also impact the larger cost of fire management. It will be important in the future 

to account not just for suppression funding but the full range of fire management costs. This will mean 

accounting for the full range of fire programs and support and assistance programs. Included within this are 

FEMA reimbursement costs to states and local governments for their suppression efforts, fuels reduction and 

fire prevention grants, and other intergovernmental assistance programs. FEMA reimbursements alone for fire 

management assistance declarations were $74 million in FY 2007 and $121 million in FY2008. 

Further aggravating the chronic budget situation are the severe impacts of the current economic recession and 

volatile energy pricing. Federal budget priorities are likely to be focused on economic stimulation and financial 

restructuring, meaning that cost containment for all other programs will be a continuing and growing emphasis 

putting all new capital investments under greater scrutiny. However, there may be opportunities to tie into 

economic recovery efforts in the future. For example, hazard fuel reduction work around WUI communities might 

be accomplished using a type of civilian conservation corps or similar public works program.

Lastly, budget stress at the federal level may pale in comparison to growing state and local budget shortages. 

Here, actual declining housing values (and decreasing property tax revenues) and reduced consumer spending 

(lower sales tax revenues) will put the majority of state budgets in a deficit condition for the next several years. 

Recent reports on state budget for FY 2009 show forty-plus states cutting budgets or using reserve funds to 

manage revenue shortfalls. It must be recognized that as budgetary reductions affect fire agencies, there also 

will be an adverse affect on these agencies ability to support and provide mutual aid to requesting agencies. 

Initial estimates of these budget shortages or gaps are not small, ranging from Nevada and Georgia (budget gaps 

of under 2 billion) to Florida at $5 billion and California at over $30 billion. Seen another way, these budget 

shortfalls account for 10 to 25% as a percentage of states general revenues. 
16

QFR

A schematic follows that summarizes these driving forces that will shape the future wildland fire management 

environment.

Threats and Risks in the Wildfire Future Environment

Summary of Driving Forces

Climate & Ecosystems Social & Political

Effects of Climate Change & Global Warming

Greater probability of bigger and longer fire 

seasons in more regions. Potential to reach 10-12 

million acre platform. 

Factors: 

Shorter, wetter winters, warmer drier summers, 

longer fire season. Larger amounts of total fire on 

the landscape. More large wildfires, 

continued irregular pattern 

 (Asymmetric fire).

Driving Forces

Continued Wildfire risk in the Wildland Urban 

Interface

Regional shifts in population and more development of 

former timberland holdings more seasonal recreation 

and residency in WUI.

Factors:

Slower growth and likely impacts of economic 

recession. Rising energy costs. 

Growing role of tribal, state, and local level efforts. 

Mitigation and fire prevention (adapting CWPPs, 

promoting hazardous fuels treatments, and fire 

education). 

Biomass Accumulation & 

Drought effects

Drought cycle another twenty years. 

Southeast, Southwest, and West regions especially 

vulnerable in terms of fire risk.

Factors:

Competition for water in ecosystems. 

Exotic invasive and insect kill effects. 

Faster drying of vegetation. More flammable fuels 

drive fire behavior. 

Driving Forces

Escalating Emergency Response 

Demands 

Fire management plays a major role in emergency 

response (greater involvement with FEMA and states 

involved in emergency response).

Factors

Likely increase in frequency, devastation, duration 

of other natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, 

etc.). Preparedness for other national disasters 

(earthquakes, pandemics, terrorism).

Organizational

New Fiscal Realities (2-3 years)

----------------------------------- Stress on Agency Budgets and Fire Budget Resources

Recession and volatile energy costs

State and local budget shortfalls

Pressure on reserve funds
17

QFR

II. Mission Strategies: Fire Management’s Next Decade 

The assumptions of future threats and risks to both natural (public lands) environments and human (wildland 

urban interface) communities will require continued development and reprogramming of federal wildland 

fire agencies’ strategies and capabilities. Efforts expended by and resources committed to fire prevention, 

preparedness, fuels reduction, and suppression response have surpassed what was expected from the National 

Fire Plan, 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy, and the Cohesive Fuel Strategy. Looking ahead, fire management’s 

approach to build strategic and tactical capability, more aggressively incorporate safety and risk management, 

and confront greatly increased and still escalating risks and threats and remain within stressed budgets will be a 

challenge.

While the statutory missions of the land management agencies vary, each contains land and resource management 

planning directives that incorporate fire management planning as a component of the larger land management 

planning process. Fire’s responsibility within land management is prefaced by its overarching commitment to 

safety and risk management. The four core strategies identified in this QFR for the future challenges re-enforce 

fire management’s pursuit of minimizing risks to public and firefighter safety and maximizing the re-establishment 

of fire-adapted ecosystems. Likewise, fire management must encompass all of the stakeholders and affected public 

in protecting communities and WUI residents while recognizing that fire has a role in managing these landscapes. 

Two other cross-cutting strategies are also outlined. One is the refinement of current fuels reduction efforts into 

an integrated fuels management portfolio capable of supporting multiple objectives and reconciling different 

priorities. The other entails developing new information access and public communication efforts using new 

mediums, technologies, and internet applications to support new social or “wildfire” networks to support public 

fire education. 

The mission strategies to be adopted, however, must do more than to position the federal agencies and their 

state, tribal, and local partners to address the challenge of more severe and more complex wildfire behaviors. 

That challenge has already arrived. What will be required will be more flexible, agile, and resilient incident 

organizations, more integration of fire management’s multiple roles to achieve both fire adapted communities 

and more fire resilient ecosystems, and perhaps most importantly, a collaborative framework for fire governance 

(local, state, tribal and federal) that promotes stronger intergovernmental fire and emergency management 

planning, prevention and mitigation efforts. Memorandums of understanding, cooperative agreements 

and interagency policies will need to be strengthened and maintained and the integration of municipal fire 

departments, volunteer fire organizations and other agencies outside the federal government will be required to 

meet the juxtaposed challenges of the future. Given the threats and risks of the escalating wildfire challenge, the 

path forward must seek to ensure that the efforts of all the stakeholders in fire management reinforce and multiply 

each other, so the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. 
18

QFR

The schematic below overviews these strategies that will be developed in this QFR:

Fire Management

Overarching Commitment to Safety & Risk Management

Core Strategies 

Fire Adapted Ecosystems and Wildfire Management

Future

Core Strategies

Wildfire Prevention and Mitigation

In the Wildland Urban Interface

Moving to Strategic 

Management 

Response within 

Asymmetric Fire

Reshaping Emergency 

Response 

within Fire Leadership

Mission 

Strategies

Fire Governance:

Building a “new” National 

Intergovernmental Wildfire 

Policy Framework

Achieving 

Fire-Adapted 

Communities

Cross Cutting Strategies

Integrated Fuels Management Portfolio

-----------------------------------

Fire Information, Communication & Education: 

New Content, Mediums, and Networks For Web 1.0/Web 2.0.

Cornerstone Strategies identified in the 2005 QFR1 will continue to be highly relevant into the next decade. 

However the continued probability that fire seasons over the next decade will be longer, fires will be larger and 

longer lasting, and wildfire acreage totals and suppression costs will increase will necessitate more strategic, 

robust, and more collaborative responses from federal fire managers and the tribal, state, and local partners. At a 

minimum this will require renewal and reprogramming of existing core capabilities within fire management and 

revisualization and realignment of roles and responsibilities throughout fire governance. 

Inherent in all cornerstone strategies is the continued and increasingly important expansion of safety and risk 

management awareness and involvement at all organizational levels. In concert with more strategic, robust, 

and collaborative responses from all federal fire managers, and state, local, and tribal partners, safety and risk 

management must receive greater attention and be incorporated into fire planning and implementation activities 

more completely and efficiently.

While safety has long been a prime concern and priority in fire management, its operational attention and 

implementation has not kept pace with the functional evolution from specific safety concerns to a comprehensive 

risk evaluation and management activity. Fire management needs to expand its thinking and implementation 

from attention to safety factors to full risk management discussions and inclusion in everyday implementation 

activities. The five federal wildland fire management agencies and their state, local, and tribal partners that 

constitute the wildland fire community while continuing current safety and risk management activities must not 

be content with these levels of output. To sustain the commitment to reducing safety issues and improving risk 

management, safety and risk management activities must be expanded and incorporate the following strategic 

elements:

1

 These Cornerstone Strategies include (1) Ensuring Fire Management’s Role in Ecosystem Sustainability, (2) Promoting Fire Adapted Human 

Communities and, (3) Balancing Emergency Response. 
19

QFR

• Expand risk management to enable a much greater involvement in fire management planning and implementation activities. Advocate and carry out investments in risk management commensurate with production pressures, expectation demands, and increasing accountability.

• Promote inclusion of new models, new scientific knowledge, and other emerging information on human 

error, safety, risk management, and implications for safe and effective operations throughout all fire and 

aviation management activities. 

• Develop new outcome measures that place safety metrics on a level equal with post-fire resource impacts 

and cost efficiency.

Safety and risk management must progress as an activity, must become more robust, and must be incorporated to a 

much greater extent in all planning and implementation actions to keep pace with the renewal and reprogramming 

of existing core capabilities within fire and aviation management.

Asymmetric Fire and Strategic Management Response 

The challenge of greater fire, larger fires, and longer fire seasons occurring irregularly within and across regions 

– asymmetric fire – will demand greater flexibility and more agile capabilities within fire management. Going 

forward will require revising overall fire suppression management strategy – moving beyond appropriate 

management response to Strategic Management Response (SMR). SMR is not a new fire management acronym, 

much less doctrine. Rather it should be viewed as a framework involving a multi-phased approach for addressing 

incident management. The phases include preparedness, response, strategic plans for fire on the landscape and a 

continual revision process. This shift in mission strategy is partly in response to definitional and cultural barriers. 

Appropriate management response is often referred to as common sense fire management, but what may seem 

like common sense to one set of decision makers can easily run afoul of other stakeholders and decision makers 

with different missions, competing objectives, and conflicting perspectives on situation information. Moving to 

strategic management response is designed to ensure a higher level of transparency, accountability, and support 

for specific fire decisions and to better display the costs and benefits of suppression strategies. This approach 

would weigh factors such as suppression costs and value of resources lost against the value of ecosystems restored 

and improved and infrastructure protected.

The other force behind an SRM framework is creating a matching capability to better integrate cost sensitivity and 

risk management into the acquisition and allocation of all resources. Given budget stresses and cost issues, fire 

management must be able to focus on the totality of fire management effort. Allocating resources in accordance 

with priorities is more than simply managing multiple demands and putting resources on the most-needed fire 

locations, it also must be able to tackle the issue of overall supply. Indeed, part of the premise of SRM is that 

suppression strategy has to be able to both scale up to higher levels of activity and reposition more rapidly to 

respond to irregular demands of asymmetric fire. 

 
20

QFR

To accomplish this, the SRM framework would incorporate several strategy elements. 

• Improve wildland fire decision-making and implementation through the introduction of a system to document strategic decisions, facilitate access and use of the next generation of risk-informed decision support 

tools, and allow for the completion of a detailed set of implementation actions as needed. Decision- making would be realigned to be more agile, flexible, and responsive to rapidly developing and changing 

conditions and retain relevancy over longer time periods.

• Land-use plans and tiered fire management planning would contain strong and effective linkages to 

CWPPs and reflect relative costs, values, and landscape resiliency associated with proposed actions, alternatives and decisions. 

• Established plans would be transformed from static, program reference documents to landscape-level strategic assessments of fire management objectives (reaching fire adapted) with strong effective linkages to 

National Incident Management Systems-compliant, Community Wildfire Protection Plans and promoting 

a collaborative approach for fire prevention and response planning. Planning would also ensure that new 

fire outcome metrics that reflect cost, values, and resiliency are in use.

• Redesign of incident management team structures to not only broaden their ability to respond (range of 

tactics and capabilities). Instead of forming larger teams, shift the focus to more modular and meldable 

incident management organizations (i.e. building the organization to fit the situation).

• Key ingredients in this drive for greater mobility and agility will be investment in new aviation capabilities (in the sense that major parts of aviation asset base must at a minimum be modernized) along with the 

application of more advanced communication, and monitoring assets for fire fighting forces.

An additional benefit of this approach to strategic management response framework would be to bring fire 

management response in line with the National Response Framework (defined as tiered response with scalable, 

flexible, and adjustable operational capabilities). 

Reshaping Emergency Response within Fire Leadership

Bringing fire management response more in line with the National Response Framework leads to a concurrent 

approach for reconfiguration of emergency response within fire leadership. Large wildfires and longer fire seasons 

are not going to be the only natural disasters in the headlines. Fire management must be prepared to go up a step 

beyond simply fulfilling its role in the national emergency support function. While the federal fire agencies will 

always make their land stewardship and protection responsibilities the primary objective, what will be needed 

is a more interactive and robust approach enabling fire agencies to work more effectively with FEMA and state 

and local community emergency response forces. Fire management must build beyond the strong training and 

technical assistance roles in national incident management that are already well established and promote stronger 

interplay and planning for emergency response efforts of all agency and jurisdictional forces.
21

QFR

This strategy entails a recalibration of emergency response into a total force concept that would consist of three 

strategy elements:

• Developing the capacity of incident management organizations (Types I, II, and III) so that all team 

members have the training and ability to address wildfire and emergency response situations, regardless of 

jurisdictional boundaries. 

• Continuing to train and assist other communities and other partners in incident management and adding 

fire and emergency response planning to emergency response training

• Building the capability for all incident management teams to be able to integrate and work effectively 

within emergency response – focusing first on local incident management teams working with FEMA AllHazard Incident Management Type 3 teams and extending to larger national and even international areas 

of operation. 

It should be noted that this mission strategy represents a course change from the 2005 QFR. The 2005 QFR 

supported efforts to limit emergency response efforts primarily to National Incident Management Organization 

teams and to emphasize short-run response efforts and avoid longer-term disaster recovery operations. The 

environment is different now- as are the capabilities of FEMA and state and local emergency response forces. It 

is difficult- both managerially and politically to distinguish between response and recovery and overall there has 

been a movement toward more integration of emergency response forces. Fire management’s engagement in a 

total force concept recognizes that all fire incident management resources must be able to participate effectively in 

emergency response, both in fulfilling emergency support functions and in assisting in other areas if appropriate. 

Conversely, the participation of FEMA and state and local Emergency Response forces (as with the California fire 

sieges in 2007 and 2008) is a future indicator of a more reciprocal state of emergency response. 

Reaffirming Fire Governance: 

Building a National Intergovernmental Wildfire Policy Framework

The QFR’s other cornerstone mission strategy in 2005 called for promoting fire-adapted human communities 

rather than escalating protection of communities at risk in the WUI per the 2000 National Fire Plan. Behind that 

goal was building a greater “sense of living with fire within communities” to which the federal agencies would 

work toward establishing responsible partnerships with WUI communities that focused on “defensible space.” 

As some ecosystems must adapt to a fire-prone environment in order to survive, so must human communities in 

the interface, if they are to survive over the long term. The fire agencies must take the lead in effecting change 

in the public’s expectation that government will always be there during a wildland fire event. It is time to change 

the public expectation to encourage communities and property owners to take responsibility and become active 

participants and an integral part of the solution.

The 2009 QFR mission strategy takes “Achieving Fire-Adapted Communities” much further. Implementation 

should include strategies for increasing knowledge and commitment, and building a sense of responsibility among 

private landowners, home owners, the insurance industry, fire districts, local governments and other key players 
22

QFR

in WUI communities for wildfire prevention and mitigation. Before addressing strategy specifics for extending 

progress on fire adapted communities, it is essential to revisit the intergovernmental dynamic, or fire governance 

that prefaces fire prevention and mitigation efforts.

The Fire Governance core strategy encompasses these elements. 

• Clarifying existing federal, state and local roles, responsibilities, and authorities for protecting the WUI 

• Realigning federal, state and local roles, responsibilities, and authorities for WUI fire protection (suppression, prevention, mitigation, and education)

It is important to note that there is a larger vision of fire-adapted communities here, mainly to extend the reach 

(i.e. having more communities involved and making collaboration more effective) and deepen the base (i.e. 

strengthening existing practices and capabilities of communities). The goal is nothing less than moving the 

consensus beyond why fire-adapted communities are important, to making them a greater reality, and ultimately 

defining success by switching the role of fire management from the “communities at risk, protect at all costs,” to 

“foster self-reliance and increase resiliency.”

What “achieving fire adapted communities” entails is important. Just as SRM must be seen in the context of 

a larger vision of restoring fire in ecosystem sustainability, “fire adapted communities” also presumes that 

states and local communities are fulfilling their roles and responsibilities in land-use planning and regulation 

(including building codes and ordinances), ensuring provision of a robust local suppression response capability, 

and establishing fire management planning and community wildfire protection plans. An apt restatement of this 

core mission strategy in this regard would be creating more effective alliances and relationships within a larger 

community of prepared and responsible partners. 

While new codes work well for new communities, the core of the nation’s WUI problem is the existing structures 

that can only be mitigated by retrofitting said structures. The fire service in partnership with building officials 

need to develop an outreach program for government, homeowners and the insurance industry. This program must 

include fiscal options and other incentives for success. 

 

In order to reaffirm fire governance, the strategy requires building a “new” national intergovernmental wildfire 

policy framework. The central premise would be to promote the operating practice that the protection and 

management of wildlands (forests, parklands, refuges, and rangelands) surrounding or adjacent to the WUI should 

be provided by the protection organization that is best-suited and positioned to effectively and cost-efficiently 

provide that protection. The first strategy element would seek new understandings and consensus among all the 

partners in the WUI to clarify the roles, responsibilities, and authorities of federal, state, tribal, and local fire 

protection organizations and property owners that are currently living in or providing wildland fire protection in 

the WUI and surrounding areas.

Once all protection organizations have confirmed their response capabilities, the second strategy element – 

realignment -- would identify opportunities to revise WUI protection roles and responsibilities among existing 

protection organizations to better match their organizational missions and response capabilities.
23

QFR

Realignment would be guided by several overarching objectives. While the aim is to realign or exchange 

suppression responsibilities to give responsibility to the party best suited to that area, a further goal would focus 

the federal suppression role on the wildland and put state or local agencies in charge of more populated areas. 

Realignment would likely entail some reallocation of the annual suppression/preparedness funding to finance 

these negotiated shifts in suppression or mitigation responsibility. Another option would be for federal lands 

immediately adjacent to communities to be managed by state or community entities via stewardship contract tied 

to clear and achievable objectives for fire behavior mitigation and land management plan guidelines. Finally, 

opportunities for potential biomass energy projects and green waste reduction could be encouraged. 

None of the steps above needed to create a new intergovernmental framework for wildfire policy will be easy. 

While the commitment to cooperate and willingness to share resources during fire incidents within the fire 

community is legendary, there are real differences in land management objectives, fire management capabilities 

(and funding availability), and protection philosophies. Still, as the costs of annual wildfire suppression and fuels 

reduction programs soar, there is increasing recognition that the time has come for clarification and realignment as 

opposed to continued controversy and dispute about whose fire strategy dominates and who should bear the cost. 

Crafting a new intergovernmental fire policy framework will provide an opportunity for all the partners to first 

ensure adherence to a general set of common operating precepts: namely, fulfilling pre-fire mitigation, defensible 

space, and individual responsibilities; taking suppression actions to keep wildfires originating on own jurisdictions 

from spreading to adjacent jurisdictions (especially when structure protection is involved); managing fuels to 

reduce fire spread potential along boundaries with other jurisdictions; and allowing reasonable access across 

ownership to support neighboring jurisdictions. 

Other dimensions subject to realignment would include local initial response contracts, exchanges of protection 

responsibility, and contracts for maintenance of fuels reduction. A further aim of the new framework would be to 

encourage community wildfire response planning where by federal land managers and state and local government 

representatives and community stakeholders establish adequate response capabilities and a joint community 

wildfire response plan that links community wildfire protection plans with federal fire management plans. 

Achieving “Fire Adapted Communities” 

Governance realignment would enhance three other mission strategy elements 

within Achieving Fire-Adapted Communities: 

• Creating community defensible space/fuels reduction zones for the WUI

• Enabling (where appropriate) leave-early-or-stay-and-defend policies for property owners 

• Recalibrating public expectations for fire adapted communities (tied to new fire outcome metrics) 

A first strategy element ensures community defensible space or fuels reduction zones for the WUI is a central 

part of an integrated fuels management portfolio within fire management. Fuels reduction efforts on both federal 

and non-federal lands would be reprogrammed in the WUI under the rubric of creating community defensible 

space and fuels reduction zones in which treatments are properly spaced, sequenced, and maintained. Federal 
24

QFR

commitment to fuels reduction for the interface is anchored in program funding requirements that half of fuels 

investments are in the WUI. And while this rate of investment has been sustained, (see Table 2) it needs to move 

to a higher level characterized by multi-jurisdictional determination for prioritizing fuels reduction projects 

around proactive communities (those with CWPPS or part of FireWise, Fire Safe, and so forth). Likewise, grant 

funding available to states for WUI protection should be focused on these same proactive communities. The 

objective should be to make strategic fuel reduction investments in and around communities where there is a high 

probability of successfully lowering the communities’ exposure to major damage from wildfire.

This level of fuels investment would pursue “shared responsibility” in the WUI where fuels reduction efforts are 

jointly planned and treated (restoring landscapes to desired condition) and long term expectations for community 

maintenance are factored in. The ideal result would be the creation of fuels defense zones bordering on and 

extending beyond WUI communities with the expectation of creating safer communities. These defense zones 

may be on a combination of private, state, and federal land. In addition, the opportunity for utilizing biomass for 

energy production could be an incentive to communities and land managers. 

Another mission strategy element for Achieving Fire Adapted Communities entails providing a wider range 

of alternatives for residents and property owners and fire managers in the WUI. It is already evident in some 

community evacuation polices and recent incident experience that total enforced evacuation from encroaching 

wildfires is changing. Indeed the logical extension of more fire-adapted ecosystems and more communities that 

require defensible space around fire-resilient structures built according to wildfire defense minded codes and 

ordinances is that homeowners should have an option to stay and defend their homes. Obviously this alternative 

must be viewed in the total context of the fire risk – there will always be fires of such a threat that early evacuation 

is the most and perhaps only responsible option.

Enabling – “Leave Early or Stay and Defend” (what is often called the “Australian model”) -- will be a departure 

from past fire management suppression tactics that have tried to dictate complete evacuation within fire zone 

perimeters. Even here, however, fire management’s potential use of point protection tactics over total perimeter 

control supports a more nuanced and flexible policy for property owners and residents. To make this alternative 

work, fire management policy would call for a clearly defined, risk- informed, “Leave Early or Stay and Defend” 

option where adequately informed homeowners would have a choice to stay and protect their homes and property. 

The option would detail agency and public education efforts, require information and notification procedures, and 

summarize community preparation steps from building codes and property owner defense planning to resident 

education. In addition, it would clarify existing policies involving rural ranchers and landowners regarding their 

ability to protect their own property. It might also consider steps to certify or at least provide for reliable selfdetermination of risk levels in terms of being fire-adapted communities. 

This leads to the last strategy element for achieving fire adapted communities. As fire management develops a 

new and more robust set of fire outcome measurements outlined under SRM, it must not leave out fire-adapted 

communities. Extending the reach and deepening the base can’t happen if fire management lacks understandable 

and demonstrable metrics on what fire-adapted means. Outcome metrics must go beyond a simple checklist of 

having defensible space, fuels treatment programs, ingress/egress and infrastructure standards, local wildfire 

response capacity, and building codes/ordinances and spacing/density for new and established structures. These 

are of course the program elements of what communities and their residents strive for in the WUI. The task ahead 

is to enable an evaluation of the return on investments of these efforts in the context of fire risk in the wildlands 

nearby. Only this way can public expectations become more realistic and enable communities and residents in the 

WUI to see both the value of past investments and what still needs to be done. 
25

QFR

Cross-cutting Strategies: An Integrated Fuels Portfolio In

Support of Land Management Objectives 

Since the inception of the National Fire Plan, fuels reduction efforts have been an essential program component 

in support of land management objectives, which include protection of communities from wildfire as well as 

ecosystems management. As noted in Table 2, nearly 30 million acres have been treated since 2000 which does 

not include acres treated by state and local agencies and communities.

As essential as fuels management is, it does not exist as an end in and of itself, but is one of many tools used to 

accomplish land and resource management objectives. Fuels management is comprised of many methods and 

techniques, which together form a fuels portfolio which may reduce, modify, or maintain fuels characteristics in 

support of other management programs. 

The strategic goal is to integrate fuels management investments and projects into larger land-management 

priorities. Ecosystems management requires the integration of a variety of management objectives and techniques 

which may include, but are not limited to, wildland fire risk reduction. Fuels management must be directly linked 

with all natural resource management functional programs, including watershed, wildlife, forestry, range, soils, air 

quality, etc. It needs to progress beyond simply a hazardous fuel treatment program of small scale and localized 

treatment and grow to represent and support a landscape-scale management capability. But, it must not be viewed 

as landscape strictly on the basis of a treatment size alone; it must combine small and large scale ecosystem 

maintenance activities, including the occurrence of wildland fire, with mid- to large-scale fuel treatments across a 

landscape to accomplish multiple land-management objectives. 

Management objectives, which may be accomplished with a fuels management portfolio, also include ecosystem 

resilience to wildfire-induced damage, increased resistance of watersheds to damage or erosion from intense fires, 

reduced smoke emissions, and reduced occurrence of invasive species. The integration of several objectives using 

a variety of fuel management techniques constitutes an integrated fuels portfolio. 

The future portfolio for fuels management programs will be driven by four factors: 

• Placement of fuel treatments based on strategic risk management or habitat protection criteria for both the 

WUI and to protect and enhance natural resources, such as important habitats or watersheds.

• Leveraging fuels treatment through cooperative state and local government programs to incentivize community efforts and build “local” fuels management capacity via grant programs to state and local entities 

and establishing cooperative programs with willing and able neighbors.

• Building potential platforms through support of the nascent wood energy/cogeneration/ethanol industry 

for support of federal goals of energy production from wood and moving toward intermixing fuels reduction biomass with other woody feed stocks and agriculture residue stocks. 

• An integrated fuels management portfolio would also involve, taking advantage of opportunities presented by the occurrence of wildfires. Fuels projects are often done in anticipation of a wildfire to reduce 

risk. The occurrence of a wildfire has not often been used as a factor in the selection of areas for fuel 
26

QFR

treatments, either to maintain the burned area in an appropriate ecological condition, to maintain fuels at 

a prescribed level, or to generally take advantage of reduced fuels and risk following the occurrence of a 

wildfire.

Restoration as a management objective is complex. If one looks at restoration as the recreation of a snapshot in 

time of ecosystem composition and structure, it may be ignoring changing environments, climate change, invasive 

species, etc. This is also true if the land-management objective is the restoration of fire as a natural process, when 

climate change may be affecting fire occurrence in unprecedented ways. 

A fuels portfolio may include mechanical, fire, chemical, or other techniques. It may also include the timing 

of treatments, their size and location, and coordination with other local, state, and federal land-management 

activities, and in particular the utilization of specialized skills and staff these entities may possess. This portfolio 

is applied in support of larger land and resource management objectives which may be unit or bureau specific. 

Inherent in the “portfolio” concept is an organization’s ability and willingness to make investment decisions that 

reflect larger overall goals and potentially involve other units. 

An example of the use of the fuels management portfolio has already been introduced as part of Achieving FireAdapted Communities – creating community defensible space and fuels reduction zones. As a component of the 

portfolio, future “investment priority” would be for those communities prepared and committed for joint planning, 

coordinating treatments, and ensuring maintenance. This process of community protection from fire would be 

part of a larger program to more broadly use fire to achieve a variety of land management objectives, such as the 

maintenance of fire-dependent ecosystems. 

A second component in the portfolio would schedule treatments on the public lands between the community’s 

WUI and the fire-dependent wilderness, for example. Here the portfolio would emphasize, using a coordinated, 

interdisciplinary, and collaborative process, new investments based on doing treatments at landscape levels as 

opposed to small unit projects. Planning for such projects would include multiple objectives -- WUI protection, 

fire effects, habitat restoration, watershed health, and even potential environmental and energy needs over longer 

timeframes (years to decades). 

The third component for the portfolio would involve wilderness. Here, accessibility, preservation of wilderness 

values, and land-management objectives limit the application of both fire and non-fire treatments on a small-scale 

basis. Predominant land management objectives direct the maintenance and reestablishment of natural processes, 

including fire. Managing unplanned ignitions for resource benefits plus the application of landscape-scale 

prescribed fire treatments represent the best means to effect fuels management and vegetation manipulation and 

accomplish land management objectives. Expansion of this activity will necessitate the updating of land-use and 

fire-management planning processes to include fuels management planning as investments on large landscapes 

with neighboring jurisdictions, water and airsheds, and species and other resource values while still supporting 

land-management objectives focusing on preservation and maintenance of wilderness values and natural 

processes.

This crosscutting strategy recognizes that not all land/resource management plans will support the scale and multijurisdictional reach contemplated here, even using the integrated fuels portfolio as a tool in achieving multiple 

objectives. But again, the value of the integrated portfolio is to give priority to areas that fit the new management 

model for achieving fire-adapted communities and to provide incentives for all local units to think and plan 

differently about fuel management and related restoration efforts
27

QFR

Cross-Cutting Strategies - New Platforms for Information

Sharing and Education (Web 1.0/Web 2.0)

A second cross-cutting strategy is vital to connectivity and information delivery in fire management. Incident 

teams on wildfires and briefing centers in the geographic and national centers are increasingly being pressed to 

communicate in real time directly to the public in wildfire situations, or conversely, provide real-time, direct access 

to incident management situations. The increase in wildfire behavior affecting risk on public lands and the WUI has 

made public outreach within fire more complex and demanding. 

A new Information Sharing and Education Strategy is advanced to establish internet platforms via Web 1.0 and Web 

2.0. New content and mediums are included capable of reaching and supporting emerging and developing networks. 

Central issues affecting a shift in fire management information management philosophy include:

• Public Information on Fire Risk, Prevention and Fire Safety is shifting from a central command and control 

focus to expanded community information sharing emphasizing real time access resulting in promotion of 

public trust.

• Enhancing collaboration with stakeholders and strengthening larger community relationships and expanding public education. Platforms are developing for dialogue with tribal, state and local authorities including 

elected officials, business and private property owners, and the larger public to develop a better understanding of fire-adapted ecosystems.

• Environmental Stewardship which promotes building and support of larger networks that are concerned with 

land management issues and public lands restoration, without driving the inclusion of a federal design or 

message.

Recent developments in internet communications and information organization will allow fire management to 

rethink mediums and opportunities for broader access and greater stakeholder and public engagement. The QFR 

recognizes the opportunities surrounding future models addressing public communication and information in both 

Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 environments.

 The steady decline of traditional media is in large part linked to trends involving the public obtaining information 

in real-time from non-traditional sources. The implications for the fire community are clear. The morning newspaper 

and evening news will not meet the demand for timely, specific and relevant information regarding fire management. 

The dynamics of future models for incident reporting and communications must provide real time information for 

those affected by the wildland fire risk. In short, the media as well as the message must change. What worked 10, 20 

and even 30 years ago will not be effective now.

A Web 1.0 future model identifies opportunities to streamline fire information through the use of different platforms 

which might include: The Fire Channel, (Hosting of a wide array of fire information including current affairs, 

history and technical information), Fire Camp as a News Center, (live broadcast or podcasts of morning and 

evening briefing, broadcast of evacuation notifications, web cam in the fire camp or on the line), NICC – National 

Interagency Coordination Center (NICC) as a Situation Room (moderator accessing fire camp or other Geographic 

Area feeds combined with interviews and pertinent information), the National Advanced Fire Research Institute 

(NAFRI), (promoting My Fire Community and Lessons Learned as the educational component). 
28

QFR

A Web 2.0 future model connects opportunities to develop social networks and portals, crises and open source 

editing, wiki’s and the use of other Web 2.0 mediums. These platforms and applications also demand a new 

understanding of fire management’s traditional role of providing public information on fire risk, prevention and 

safety, effects and final outcomes. Fire management must seek to improve communication, provide better access 

to information promoting fire-adapted communities and enhancing new understandings about wildfire, water, air 

quality, carbon, global warming, biodiversity and habitat restoration, etc.

In actuality, these future models along with advances and uses of emerging technologies are already transforming 

conventional concepts of public outreach. Benefits of a new crosscutting strategy for fire management on 

information and communication will be an informed, active and knowledgeable community better suited to take 

on additional protection and mitigation responsibilities and emergency responses. A true fire-adapted community 

will be connected and communicative which are both inextricably linked.

The summary figure that follows displays the 2009 mission strategies and elements.

Mission Strategy Core Strategy Elements & Capabilities

Overarching Commitment to Safety & Risk Management

Suppression Strategy within 

Asymmetric Fire

Moving to Strategic Management 

Response: 

• Ensure proactive wildland fire decisions aligned in a Strategic Response 

Framework 

• Recalibrate fire planning andfire outcome metrics

• Realigning team structure to transform ability to respond to SRM

• Place fire management response in line with the National Response 

Framework

• Fuels Management Portfolio for larger landscapes 

Reshaping Emergency Response 

within Fire Leadership

• Recalibrate capacity to respond – total force concept 

• Train and assist other agency and community players (build partnership 

capacity)

• Extend reach for emergency response through total force concept 

Reaffirming Fire Governance:

Building a “new” National 

Intergovernmental Wildfire 

Policy Framework

• Clarify federal, tribal, state and local roles, responsibilities, and authorities 

for WUI protection 

• Realign federal, tribal, state and local roles, responsibilities, and authorities 

for WUI fire protection (suppression, prevention, mitigation, and 

education)

Achieving Fire-Adapted Communities

Supported by an 

Integrated Fuels

Management Portfolio

• Building Community Defensible Space / Fuels reduction zones (treatments 

properly spaced and sequenced)

• Enabling (where appropriate) Leave Early-or-Stay and Defend policies for 

property owners 

• Recalibrating public expectations in the Fire Adapted Community era (Fire 

outcome metrics)

Reimaging Wildfire in a Web 2.0 World

Creating New Content, Mediums, and 

Networks 

For Information Sharing & 

Education

• Rethinking public information on fire risk, prevention, and fire Safety within 

Web 1.0 (The Fire Channel) 

• Enhancing collaboration and building partnerships through social networks 

within Web 2.0 (Myfirecommunity.net)

• Revitalizing environmental stewardship education –Public lands & wildfire 

(“Fire-opedia” Web 2.0)
29

QFR

Looking to the Future: Balancing Risk – Creating New Results 

All of the mission strategies for the future carry a continued expectation for high reliability that transcends 

successful performance. Given the levels of wildfire and the risks inherent in potentially annual 10-12 million 

acres of wildfire on the land, public and firefighter safety must remain an unequivocal priority. 

Fire management’s role in ecosystem sustainability will also require new consideration of environmental 

mandates for carbon sequestration and reduction of CO2 emissions. State and regional regulations and new 

carbon goals will have a concurrent effect that may also have be factored into agency resource value goals, land 

management resource planning, fire management plans, and community wildfire protection plans. Strategic 

Management Response will require better planning and decision-making support systems along with the 

realignment of incident management teams to situation management organizations. 

Continued progress toward achieving fire adapted human communities will demand more than redrawing 

protection boundaries and mobilization compacts. Movement toward a new federal framework that pushes beyond 

appearances of federal fire management dominance to true intergovernmental fire management cooperation is 

paramount. 

Strategies should support communities organizing to take action, striving to be self-sufficient, and above all, 

becoming more comfortable (and knowledgeable) with prescribed and natural fires in their environs. This will be 

further enabled by the new generation of public information and education strategies via internet communications 

and social networking that require cultural change as well as rethinking information access and exchange 

technologies. 

The remaining two sections of the QFR report switch to an assessment of current workforce and resource levels 

with a review of decision support, resource coordination, and logistical planning systems. Section III details 

workforce capabilities and projects training and development needs. Section IV examines capital equipment 

requirements, modernization issues, and strategic sourcing before reviewing systems and technology development 

issues.

 
30

QFR

III. Workforce Capabilities, Structure and Preparedness

Fire’s mission strategies for the future will also demand renewing key capabilities in planning, decision-making, 

reliable response, collaboration in governance, building stronger community relationships, and enhancing 

training, technical assistance, and public education. The QFR defines new mission strategies and objectives for 

repositioning the workforce within fire management in core capabilities to meet future risks and threats. 

The federal wildland fire agencies are in the process of reviewing how the larger structure (national and regional) 

of the agencies should be adapted to accomplish fire management’s mission and how it should support the 

interagency-landscape and more collaborative community relationships changes. This review will be especially 

significant in light of the advocated realignment proposed in the fire governance mission strategy and the more 

robust capabilities that are inherent in fire adapted communities

Current Force Structure

Over the next few years, as federal and state agencies cope with mounting budget deficit pressures to contain and, 

in many instances, reduce expenditure levels in all programs, fire management’s force structure and ability will 

be challenged. Reliance on retirees to fill some incident management team positions will continue in the short 

term. Fire management will at best be expected to maintain fire fighting capacity at zero growth levels and absorb 

higher inflationary costs. At the other budget end, annual appropriated costs for fire management may actually be 

cut with the expectation that suppression costs would be covered by reserve funds or supplemental. Either way, 

fire management will be challenged to just to hold level its preparedness force structure numbers as they deal with 

larger program cost pressures, financial adjustments, and other budget issues. 

Even if funding levels for the current force structure numbers in preparedness are maintained, operational and 

equipment costs will continue to increase. While forecasts for inflation vary because of the current recession and 

slumping demand, most economists expect costs to double from levels in the last 5 years, especially when high 

energy costs return. While recessionary pressures will make fire fighting attractive to contractors, the net result 

will still be considerable reductions in buying power for firefighting operations. When energy prices again reach 

higher levels, cost increases in agency operations and contract operations will be dramatic.

Faced with the ongoing challenges of climate change, fuel accumulation and the WUI, the primary objective is to 

continue to maintain the core fire management force structure, especially at the local (initial response) level, and 

maintain the initial attack success rate. While the preparedness resources summarized in the table below are not 

absolutes they represent basic thresholds for support of local fire and fuel management.

 
31

QFR

Table 3 Preparedness Resources 

Preparedness Resources

Federal Personnel* DOI FS Total

 Firefighters (includes IHC) 3,529 9,760 13,289

 Smokejumpers 137 320 457

 Overhead & Prevention 1,302 400 1,702

 Federal Agency Subtotal 4,968 10,480 15,448

Tribal, State, Local, Volunteer** Career Volunteer Total

 Firefighters 294,100 807,150 1,101,250

Incident Management Teams I II II (State) FUMA

 # Teams (all agencies) 17 18 36 7

*Source: DOI and Forest Service 2009 Budget Justifications

**Source: USFA, Oct 2006 

There are several initiatives currently in progress among the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, the National 

Association of State Foresters, and the U.S. Fire Administration to integrate local government forces into the 

overall, interagency response capability to reflect true national resource levels. In 2006 it was estimated that 

almost 25% of fire departments could handle an urban-interface fire of more than 500 acres using just locally 

trained personnel, though 27% of departments consider such an incident outside their responsibility. Maintaining 

programs to increase the capability of local fire departments to respond successfully to wildland fire and WUI 

incidents is vital.

Workforce Preparedness and Development

The federal wildland fire agencies have long used a variety of workforce resources, both internally and externally, 

to accomplish the full range of the fire and fuel management missions. With the increase in funding and hiring 

from the National Fire Plan in 2000, fire management took a major step toward transforming a mostly collateral 

duty volunteer workforce to a more dedicated professional fire management force. Likewise, efforts to raise 

firefighting and emergency response capabilities increased among tribal, state, and local partners and volunteer 

fire departments and contractors. The challenge to the agencies now is to identify the effects of flat or declining 

budgets with increased overhead costs and buying power which will require reassessing organizational structures 

and alternative forms of hiring and service acquisitions.

In suppression, the federal agencies still rely on their fire preparedness funded resources and other resources 

from non-fire programs, which make up the “militia” for fire. The militia provides valuable resources to both fire 

suppression and prescribed fire, and its involvement in the future will be essential. In 2008, there were more than 
32

QFR

36,000 federal personnel with some qualifications that are certified to support and/or fight fire. 

About 15,000 of those have participated on “all-risk” incidents. These “responders” are located throughout eleven geographic areas across the United States and are classified as national, regional, or local 

resources for wildland fire. 

This QFR is premised on the near-term assumptions that the total preparedness workforce strength (nearly 15,448 

fire fighter equivalents) will be sustained while the total incident qualified numbers (between 32,000-36,000 

individuals) may slip due to a number of factors. One dominant issue that must be considered is the impacts of 

workforce reductions, increases in workload, and re-organizations in non-fire program areas that could affect the 

future availability of the fire militia. Other challenges will include maintaining certification levels and meeting 

training requirements in the growing complexity of fire management work. 

The federal wildland fire agencies devote a significant amount of time and resources to training and employee 

development. This begins with the basic and advanced training required so that all fire management personnel 

meet interagency standards and are certified as qualified to perform their duties. Agencies also provide advanced 

technical and specialized training for the full range of fire management activities at the regional and national 

levels. 

Safety remains as the fundamental basis for most training requirements. As fire ground situations become ever 

more complex, fire fighters from all levels of government need cross-training in both wildland and structural 

fire fighting safety, tactics and strategy. Every fire response brings with it the risk of injury and death to both 

firefighters and the public. Firefighters must be skilled in assessing the risk associated with both taking action and 

not taking action. Occasionally, even sound decisions result in tragic outcomes and while firefighters operating 

within the scope of their training and qualifications are legally protected, these protections will continue to be 

challenged. 

Building the workforce capacities to accommodate the new mission requirements outlined in the QFR will require 

realignment and redirection of the existing workforce. Succession planning will also be needed. A preliminary 

review of the IQCS federal firefighting force shows general balance in terms of age distribution among fire 

fighters, crew supervisors, and incident team leadership. Figure 3 shows the demographics for the percentage-age 

breakout of basic firefighter ranks, crew supervisors, and select leadership positions and some of the specialist 

positions2

. Although there is considerable variation among the agencies and there is a significant cadre of top 

leaders in the Incident Command leadership ranks in the upper age ranks (over 48), the overall numbers show the 

expected balance of age distribution across ranks of the federal firefighting workforce.

2

 This analysis uses an IQCS data base number of 10,500 qualified fire fighters, 5,000 crew supervision, and 1,500 in incident command.
33

QFR

Figure 3 

Source: National Advanced Fire Research Institute – November 2008

Within some of the more specialized positions, there are issues with older employees. In some specialties – such 

as public information, plans, and logistics -- more than two-thirds of the leadership positions are over the age of 

50. As the Incident Qualifications Certification System in place now does provide the numbers of trainees in the 

systems, this will enable fire management to look at training and qualification incentives to deal with succession 

management at the macro level. (It should be stated, however, that the system numbers reviewed here reflect only 

numbers of qualifications obtained and do not speak to availability or multiple qualifications held individuals.) 

What is apparent is that fire management is rapidly reaching a point where it must redirect the choices made by 

firefighters -- choosing qualifications for firefighters as opposed to letting firefighters choose their qualifications. 

The workforce cannot simply be stretched to accomplish increasing workloads to essentially “do more with 

less.” The nature of fire and fuel management work will still require high levels of reliability, and concerns for 

safety are always paramount. The reality of current and future budget levels entails improving existing workforce 

skills, shifting to multi-purpose roles, and ensuring that better decisions are made and are consistent with the cost 

management goals pursued by fire management at all levels. Investments in training will be needed to improve 

workforce capability so that the flexibility and modularity envisioned in strategic management response can be 

realized. . 

36

among the agencies and there is a significant cadre of top leaders in the Incident 

Command leadership ranks in the upper age ranks (over 48), the overall numbers show 

the expected balance of age distribution across ranks of the federal firefighting 

workforce.

Figure 3

Source: National Advanced Fire Research Institute – November 2008 

Within some of the more specialized positions, there are issues with older employees. In 

some specialties – such as public information, plans, and logistics -- more than two-thirds 

of the leadership positions are over the age of 50. As the Incident Qualifications 

Certification System in place now does provide the numbers of trainees in the systems, 

this will enable fire management to look at training and qualification incentives to deal 

with succession management at the macro level. (It should be stated, however, that the 

system numbers reviewed here reflect only numbers of qualifications obtained and do not 

speak to availability or multiple qualifications held individuals.) What is apparent is that 

fire management is rapidly reaching a point where it must redirect the choices made by 

firefighters -- choosing qualifications for firefighters as opposed to letting firefighters 

choose their qualifications.

The workforce cannot simply be stretched to accomplish increasing workloads to 

essentially “do more with less.” The nature of fire and fuel management work will still 

2

 This analysis uses an IQCS data base number of 10,500 qualified fire fighters, 5,000 crew supervision, 

and 1,500 in incident command. 

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

3500

Under 30 31 to 36 37 to 42 43 to 48 49 to 54 55 or over

Federal Firefighters By Qualification Level By Age

Firefighters Crew Supervisors Incident Commanders
34

QFR

Creating New Workforce Skill Set Requirements

The general assumption of no net gain in positions within fire and fuel management due to funding limitations is 

a given, and the reality that some positions may have to be reduced given current budget scenario should not be 

discounted. This means accomplishing mission capacities must come through redirecting existing workforce skills 

and developing new workforce strengths. Planning skills need to include modeling for future ecosystem changes 

and emphasizing landscape ecology. Planners for both agency land management plans and fire management 

plans need better collaboration, conflict resolution and understanding of social demands skills. Decision-making 

skills need to include more predictive skills for long term risk assessments and monitoring to allow for adaptive 

management. Leadership and science needs to better support and create new learning experiences for the decision 

maker.

Community relations and education skills need to include knowledge of grants and agreements processes, 

assessing fire protection capability, technical knowledge of building codes and ordinances, FIREWISE use and 

promotion, and long-term fuel maintenance planning near fire-adaptive communities.

Skills in fuel management need to be further developed to provide better modeling capabilities, adaptive 

management and assessment of risk, fuels, and disturbance regimes. These skills need to be seamlessly integrated 

into all fuel planning efforts, which will further support decision makers. Most past successes in fuel management 

by the agencies can be attributed to strong local leadership. Future fuel management training efforts need to be 

focused on developing leadership in both fire managers and agency administrators. 

The skill set for emergency response requires increased training skills to improve knowledge and experience 

levels of non-fire and National Response Framework response agencies outside of the incident environment. 

Skills in mentoring external personnel during incidents will need to be enhanced and broadened. Competitive 

sourcing and contract management skills can also offer options for accelerating the dependency reduction.

Strengthening the Workforce

Overall, fire management must continue building a workforce that better melds core capabilities and workforce 

capacities into successful mission accomplishments. In terms of core capabilities, workforce capacities must 

address the following:

• First and foremost, the agencies’ priorities must focus on meeting their land stewardship role, and fire 

management should continue to build its expertise in environmental leadership. 

• Relationships need to be enhanced among fire management, line officers/agency administrators and resource management personnel to provide more cohesive leadership and integrated planning. 

• Build a strong Strategic Management Response capability where suppression strategies are focused on 

fire’s role in the ecosystem to maximize resource benefits and reduce costs. 
35

QFR

• Prevention and mitigation efforts need to be directed toward creating fire adaptability in communities. 

Partnerships must be created within communities to promote fire adaptability and support those communities that embrace the concepts

• Educational programs must be enhanced to support the professional development of current and future 

employees in planning, decision-making, leadership and public education. 

• Cadres must be provided to support and train non-fire agencies entering the field of incident management 

through the National Response Framework, which would reduce overall response demand and provide 

additional resources for fire incidents.

• Monitoring systems need to be established, including third party monitoring protocols, to ensure that fire 

use and/or suppression strategies are being accomplished, that to assure objectives are met in accordance 

with established priorities for maximizing resource benefits.

The future agenda must address human capital issues. There will be numerous challenges facing the federal 

agencies during this workforce transformation and development of skill sets for the future. Recruitment, training 

and development, retention, and safety will all pose new challenges to the agencies and affect all employees. As a 

priority, the agencies must devote time and energy into recruitment to create a diverse and dynamic workforce that 

assists new and existing employees in skill development and career planning. New employees should be directed 

or counseled toward skill set areas where shortages are anticipated due to looming retirements. 

Continuing the support of professional development within the fire and fuel programs will greatly increase 

retention and promote the agencies as the employer of choice. Investment levels in training within fire 

management amount to a million plus hours of training for the workforce annually from health qualification and 

basic safety and refresher training to the range of academy and specialized professional courses that comprise the 

backbone of the incident qualifications system for fire fighters. Fire management’s continued success depends 

greatly on its commitment to safety within its workforce and its investment in that workforce to meet and 

maintain the highest standards in the vital work it performs. 
36

QFR

IV. Operations, Capital Resources, and Technologies

Increased fire activity over the past four years has resulted, along with higher suppression costs, in higher usage 

rates of capital equipment and aviation resources. Federal agency assets have always operated concurrently 

with state and local forces and both sides are increasingly supplemented by contractor resources. In several 

situations, National Guard assets have also been utilized. As some fire seasons have extended and wildfires have 

gone to longer-term management efforts, resource contracts have also gone to longer terms or exclusive use to 

reduce costs and ensure continuity of resource availability. These increased rates of usage also demand that the 

fire management community address factors that limit its ability to respond effectively and maintain the highest 

safety levels in the future. These issues include aging and outdated capital assets (especially aviation assets), 

more flexible strategic sourcing options, and more robust and flexible fire management resources coordination, 

prioritization, and logistical support. 

Capital Assets: Equipment & Aviation Resources

The 2008 fire equipment roster listed in the 2009 federal agency fire budget justifications shows the capital side of 

federal fire management’s capabilities.

Table 4 - Fire Equipment Resources (2008-2009)

Source: FS and DOI FY2009 Budget Justifications

*Committed to only wildland fire fighting for the contract period during fire season

**Call When Needed-Hired for specific events or incidents

Ground-based firefighting equipment and personnel will continue to be the backbone of the program; however, 

rising operating and replacement costs and budget constraints may eventually limit numbers. Engines, water 

tenders, dozers, plows, and specialized equipment for soft ground operation will undergo continual upgrading and 

replacement with little new technology coming on the scene. Hand crews will provide the ability to extinguish 

Preparedness Resources 2008

DOI USFS Total

Equipment and Apparatus

 Engines 745 950 1,695

 Tenders/Dozers/Plows 206 210 416

 Total Heavy Equipment 951 1,160 2,111

Aviation

 Helicopters T2 and T3 (Exclusive use*) 43 87 130

 Helicopters T1 (CWN**) 35 35

 Airtankers (including water scoopers) 2 20 22

SEATS (Exclusive Use) 17 2 19

Other Aircraft (IR, Smokejumper, ASM) 22 21 43
37

QFR

and manage fire in rugged terrain. Maintenance of facilities that house and support these resources must be 

scheduled and funded. Improved geographic positioning systems, automated equipment tracking systems and 

communications capability will increase their efficiency of use and provide for both an increased measure of 

safety and some ability to redeploy resources, especially in larger complex and area command situations, 

As noted, the capital assets of state, local, tribal, and volunteer fire departments that are a critical part of fire 

preparedness will play an increasingly important role. Different equipment and training are required for a 

wildland fire response than for an urban fire response. The place where these situations intermingle, the wildland 

urban interface, becomes a mixing pot of equipment types and firefighter skills. As this confluence zone increases, 

fire response agencies are compelled to equip, train, and staff for all situations. This type of hybrid fire response 

organization becomes increasingly expensive to maintain and often redundancies exist along jurisdictional 

boundaries. Part of the intention behind realignment within the fire governance mission strategy is to focus agency 

specialization on the type of fire that is consistent with that organization’s land management purpose.

Rather than all jurisdictions organizing to fight all types of fire, more specialization is likely to happen in an 

attempt to increase efficiency of operations. A step forward will be if, as planned, in the governance realignment 

mission strategy, wildland agencies return more to their basic wildland fire protection responsibilities while tribal, 

local, and volunteer fire response organizations continue to emphasize their first responder priorities of structure 

suppression, vehicle accidents, and basic life support. As future roles for these forces in all aspects of fire and fuel 

management are augmented, these assets need to be included in current state assessments and future planning. 

Likewise, capital assets of contractors and other suppliers need to be included.

Modernizing Aviation 

While aviation is just one part of the response to wildland fire, a more agile and modern aviation capability is 

essential to meet this challenge. Success in strategic management response strategies will require at a minimum: 

• Focusing future strategies on increasing the number of aerial delivered fire fighters; this will allow agencies to maintain a professional, robust initial attack force while establishing a surge capability to support 

national mobilization during large-scale fire events.

• Establishing a national interagency air attack program characterized by a highly mobile fleet that is centrally managed and capable of meeting the increasing need for rapid and wide ranging response for aerial 

supervision and intelligence gathering missions for all federal agency, state, tribal and local governments.

• Adjusting the Aerial Supervision Module program from lease-based to government-owned will allow for 

the development of a standardized platform, that includes the same aircraft make, model and equipment, 

which is critical for interoperability and efficiency between agencies. 

• Ensure that agency remote sensing programs are positioned to meet the increasing requirements for real 

time fire information while maintaining the capability to procure and/or develop new fire imaging technology that is portable and has interoperability with agency owned, leased or contracted aircraft
38

QFR

• Establishing common standards and approval processes for the streamlined use of federal, state and local 

aviation assets. This will help ensure that wildland fire fighters will have access to the widest range of 

aircraft for both initial attack and large fire support.

All these programs require intensive, and in some cases, centralized management to provide a safe and effective 

result.

Initial attack will remain the priority but support to large fire operations will be common. Aircraft replacements 

or upgrades that can perform multiple missions (retardant delivery, smokejumping, and passenger transport) 

should be given stronger consideration. These multi-purpose aircraft can increase efficiency and lower cost by 

eliminating the need for separate platforms.

Numbers and kinds of aircraft will remain relatively stable over the next 10 years with a few exceptions. Single 

Engine Air Tankers have become an increasingly effective tool. Their ability to operate from small airfields 

using portable retardant equipment makes them a nimble and effective resource when managing asymmetric 

fire. Infrared aircraft are likely to be replaced overtime by unmanned aircraft systems or satellite intelligencegathering systems through government and commercial sources. Small increases in the number of aircraft for 

aerial supervision modules and air tactical group supervision will provide better operational management in an 

increasingly complex airspace environment. The numbers and mix of helicopters will likely remain about the 

same as are currently in the fleet.

As with any type of equipment fleet, a sustainable program requires periodic capital investments to replace 

worn, damaged or retro-fitted equipment with newer, more efficient purpose-built equipment. The wildland fire 

aviation program is no different and the Large Air Tanker fleet is particularly in need of this type of attention 

although capital investments must be planned for other aircraft types as well. Further, agencies should be 

positioned for the periodic unplanned replacement of existing aircraft through fleet acquisition and/or contracting 

commercially available aircraft. Agencies continued efforts on reducing aircraft losses through the development 

and implementation of aviation safety initiatives such as continued airworthiness programs, aircraft performance 

monitoring, safety management systems and mission-specific training will help reduce aircraft losses to incidents 

and accidents.

Equally important, the methods of acquisition and ownership will likely become more diverse. Vendor owned 

and operated aircraft currently provide the bulk of the aviation resources. These are procured through a variety of 

contracting methods with the major categories being exclusive use and call when needed. Exclusive use aircraft 

form the base organization, with call-when-needed being used for surge capability. Generally, exclusive-use 

aircraft contract availability and flight rates are less expensive than those for the same make/model call when 

needed aircraft. Vendor aircraft are provided by a variety of companies, ranging from a vendor with one aircraft 

to vendors that supply multiple aircraft. This situation makes contract administration, inspections, carding and 

monitoring of operations more labor and time intensive than contracting with one entity to provide all aircraft. 

The diversity of vendors does allow for more flexibility in acquiring aircraft that are a better fit for the geography, 

fire behavior, topography and length of season than would a single vendor. 
39

QFR

Improving Strategic Sourcing

Contracting is a critical component of the wildland fire program. Without the option to procure a wide range 

of products and services, the fire agencies would spend a significant amount of money and energy to purchase 

equipment and supplies and hire additional employees. Over the past decade, considerable effort has been 

expended examining contracting options for the array of work performed within fire management.

Some of these efforts have centered on competitive sourcing reviews of various functions from public information 

and training to dispatch and aviation. Competitive sourcing is a process clearly defined by government regulation. 

The objective is to provide a fair and competitive process between government and private industry to provide 

services for the agencies. This process works best when the product or service is widely available and easily 

provided by either the government or industry. For the wildland fire agencies, many services are neither 

commonly available nor widely provided. Many require a large initial investment but do not have a wide or steady 

demand and may pose a high financial risk to potential providers. Competitive sourcing doesn’t always provide a 

comprehensive solution to wildland fire acquisition needs but often provides insights for management efficiencies.

Three “management efficiency assessments” (Aviation, Dispatch, and Training) have been produced representing 

federal interagency teams designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of wildland fire operations. 

Recommendations cover a wide range of aspects of each of these important interagency components of the 

wildland fire program, covering business processes and rules, location and management of facilities, and 

development or refinement of management systems and tools. An interagency, intergovernmental steering 

committee is currently evaluating the recommendations from the three management efficiency assessments to 

prepare a proposal for agency leadership for integrated, multi-year implementation. 

As an alternative to competitive sourcing, fire management has been moving to strategic sourcing in an effort to 

provide goods and services to the public for all fire management activities through an effective and cost efficient 

mix of agency, partner and contracting. The term “sourcing” can be viewed differently in that the source of the 

service may be from within the agency. The term “strategic” implies that the process is ongoing, long term, and 

does not sacrifice future options in order to maximize short term benefits, at the same time looks to increase 

options by involving all potential stakeholders

Describing sourcing and procurement as only a contracting action provides a limited view of the options and path 

ahead. A better way to describe the way agencies get resources and services should be through a partnership for 

strategic sourcing. By entering into a partnership, the hope is all would benefit and the wildland fire community 

and the taxpayer receive quality goods and services at a competitive cost. The partnership aspect may be the 

most difficult since all parties need to be included, without giving up the benefits of competition. Aviation is an 

example. Since there are limits by aircraft capability and availability in terms of supply. But options do exist, if all 

are involved --contractor, military, agency, cooperators. 

The need to engage agency leaders, partners, and industry in a strategic dialogue about the demands and 

innovative and efficient ways to meet those demands is critical. A partnership for strategic sourcing could take 

many forms and would benefit from a diversity of members, processes and procedures. It is also possible that a 

range of partnerships will be more powerful than establishing one overarching group and process. It may also 

be useful in the future to look at sectors or part such as aviation, training, or other groups individually since the 

methods and resources may vary across the various specialties.
40

QFR

Preparing Fire Management for Future Operations

Fire management will need to be prepared to respond to significant changes in the theater of operations. As 

expected, workload is trending upward as reflected in Figure 4 which depicts the number of days when fire 

management has reached preparedness levels 4 and 5 over the past decade. 

In the future, fire management integrated systems and services should provide additional tools to help manage 

national preparedness levels. Predictive Services will provide current and expected levels of incident activity, 

intensities, and growth potential. The Resource Ordering and Statusing System already provides real time 

availability for firefighting resources across the country. The Incident Qualifications and Certification System 

provides critical incident position management information and incident management succession planning 

capability. 

Figure 4 

 

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 5 YR

AVG

10 YR

AVG

20 YR

AVG

National Preparedness Levels 4 & 5 - 1999-2008

Days at PL 5

Days at PL 4

Source: National Interagency Fire Center December 2008

However, several critical areas will demand significant investments to enhance the program capabilities 

needed for the federal fire agencies to meet future workload demands. Each of these areas greatly affects fire 

management’s potential to increase the efficiency and productive application of the existing fire resources: 

decision support and prioritization, resource coordination, logistical support. 

However, just as future budget realities should dispel expectations for a large workforce increase, a flat budget 

in the foreseeable horizon means that modernization of operations and acquisition of new technologies must 
41

QFR

also meet cost containment or even cost-reduction goals. Essentially, federal agencies must further develop their 

capability to more efficiently use the resources that are currently available.

Advancing Decision Support and Prioritization

This key area includes several aspects that need modernization and new knowledge developed. The FPA system is 

designed to provide managers with a common interagency process for fire management planning and budgeting to 

evaluate the effectiveness of alternative fire management strategies through time, to meet land management goals 

and objectives. FPA will reflect fire objectives and performance measures for the full scope of fire management 

activities. Firefighting assets will initially be positioned on the ground at the beginning of fire season based on 

FPA analysis.

Determining the current year’s locally specific fire risk will depend on more a detailed analysis than FPA is 

designed to provide. This demands more analysis from the predictive services staff at the national and geographic 

locations that provide information and intelligence that support large-fire strategy selection and resource 

allocation. Inputs from these meteorological and fire behavior experts, coupled with topographical and vegetative 

information, should be expanded to enable local, geographic, and national managers to make better informed 

decisions and to better allocate fire resources. 

The availability of centralized real time evaluations would free local fire managers from the time-consuming 

predictive assessment and allow them to focus on incident management and public safety. The National Predictive 

Service Unit should continue to provide the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group with the information 

necessary to reinforce portions of the country that are approaching critical fire indices. The National Predictive 

Service Unit also should continue to play a vital role in helping shape portfolio decisions involving hazardous fuel 

treatment investments by providing information on localized conditions that affect treatment parameters.

Full application of the Wildland Fire Decision Support System should provide greater decision support and 

analysis tools. This system is primarily geospatial, and uses pre-loaded shape files and data layers to provide 

information to the user. One major component of the Wildland Fire Decision Support system is FSPRO (Fire 

Spread Probability) a spatial model that calculates the probability of fire spread from a current fire perimeter or 

ignition point for a specified time period.. More effort will be needed to in reviewing and modifying landscape 

data for use by FSPRO as a preplanning activity. 

Improving Resource Coordination 

Fire management is more than just firefighters, engines, and aircraft. The backbone of the federal wildland fire 

agencies’ success in large fire response is their unique ability to coordinate the movement of vast numbers of 

firefighters and resources across the country. A network of interagency coordination centers throughout the U.S. 

maintains status information of all available firefighting personnel and equipment. The coordination system is 

a three-layered organization linking national, geographic or regional, and local hubs. These centers have the 

capability to order personnel and equipment, track asset movements, and arrange transportation to and from 

incidents throughout the country. The centers all utilize common ordering, tracking, and operating procedures 

to facilitate smooth operations. Coordination centers also provide current vital fire information such as weather 
42

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forecasts, and fuel conditions to fire managers, along with predictions for expected fire activity and intensity. 

Future development within resource coordination, whether solely for wildland fire activities and/or non-wildland 

fire response involvement over the next 5 to 10 years will be essential. With rapidly expanding information 

technology advances, electronic status, location, tracking, and ordering, are a must for timely resource 

coordination. Implementing new technology in a timely manner, providing funding and training at all levels/

locations, and supporting changes is paramount for successful coordination. 

Recruiting and maintaining a high quality, enthusiastic workforce is increasingly important as the coordination 

system plays a large part in meeting expectations and goals within wildland fire and other natural resource 

disciplines, agencies, and departments. Resource coordination/response is enhanced, in part, by support of the fire 

management Predictive Service Units. Decisions are made based on current and future intelligence. Predictive 

Service Unit provides current weather and fire danger assessments, resource allocation (quantities and type) 

recommendations and prioritization support to the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group.

Interagency cooperation, information exchange, and improving efficiency within the current dispatch system 

are, and will be a priority to meet the increased demands wildland fire agencies are facing. Tactical resources 

available to meet current and future demands need to be maintained as a minimum at current levels and should be 

increased. The coordination system is the hub of many agencies and disciplines, and is relied upon for accurate 

knowledge of multiple agency protocols and policies. 

Providing More Flexible Logistical Support 

Facilities to support firefighting operations include fire stations and engine bays, living facilities, administrative 

offices, retardant bases, and coordination and dispatch centers. The mechanisms to construct and provide 

maintenance are different between the two departments. The Department of the Interior agencies receive facilities 

funding through the fire appropriation, while the Forest Service receives its funding in the engineering budget 

line. That small difference makes it difficult to plan joint facilities or upgrades to existing facilities. 

The implementation of FPA should present all agencies with interesting decisions. If the protection resources from 

adjacent jurisdictions are found to be the best alternative to provide protection, the prudent agency administrator 

must ask if it is a wise investment to maintain existing facilities in an area protected by some other agency. FPA 

may provide the information needed for making decisions to declare some facilities excess to our needs, and 

redirect scarce facility funds. Protection planning by fire protection units may also discover advantages to newly 

located facilities or, perhaps, jointly funded facilities to leverage both departments’ funds. Additional studies will 

provide recommendations on adjusting the number and location of air and reload bases needed to support the air 

tanker program. 

The National Interagency Fire Cache System provides direct support to incidents by furnishing equipment and 

supplies. The cache system has a combined inventory value of over $70 million. Each of the caches serves an 

interagency community. Each cache is hosted by an agency within a geographic coordinating area and is funded, 

staffed, and managed by that agency and is responsible to provide incident support to all customers within 

the Geographic Area Coordination Center. All caches conform to a national plan, utilize a common ordering 

system, have common item designation codes, conform to national standards for equipment/supply kits and have 

refurbishing standards. 
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While the interagency fire cache system has served the fire community well, there are major new technologies 

that many organizations have used to replace their legacy large scale depot and warehouse storage systems. 

The military has made the modernization of its supply chain a major goal in trying to reduce the cycle time for 

resource delivery and cost reduction. Interagency cooperation and coordination in the use of new technology 

throughout the cache system will be essential. 

A review process of fire management’s cache system is currently underway which is assessing options from 

reengineering the system to strategic sourcing. The supply chain system being dealt with here involves reusable 

durable goods and expendable goods, which is different from other systems. Still, the future direction poses an 

opportunity to modernize fire cache management and save money while preserving cycle time standards currently 

being achieved.

Future Directions in Resources and Technology

The future course of resources and technology is promising with a list of promising investments and leading-edge 

projects. New technology in fire management systems is now focusing on minimizing direct human participation 

in high-risk activities and activities where human error could lead to significant failure. The use of increasingly 

sophisticated remote sensing technologies will begin to put greater distance between humans and the risks 

associated with wildland fire activities. Some of the more promising technological advancements include the use 

of Unmanned Aviation Systems, utilization of remote cameras, improved intelligence using real time information, 

implementing the Automated Flight Following system, and use of “Human Aiding” technology

New technology and different approaches that minimize human flight time will improve the effectiveness and 

efficiency of wildland fire operations while greatly reducing risk. Fire suppression in the next decade will begin 

a transformation process driven by technology, requirements for greater mobility and agility, and suppression 

strategies that will demand new levels of flexibility and precision. Major shifts in technology investment will 

include acquiring modern air assets, improving monitoring and surveillance capabilities, developing more 

complete and effective communication linkages including air-to-ground, unit-to-unit, engine-to-engine, etc., and 

creating a new generation of decision support tools. These new intelligence and decision support systems will 

use “real time” information collected by satellites and Unmanned Aerial Systems. Unmanned Aerial Systems has 

potential uses in fire detection, perimeter mapping, fire behavior assessment and command-and-control operations 

reducing both risk and cost. Utilization of remote cameras for fire monitoring can also reduce exposure and flight 

time in smoke and low visibility situations. 

Several efforts will improve aircraft effectiveness and efficiency. Aircraft modernization will be an ongoing effort. 

Newer, safer, more agile aircraft with increased fuel efficiency and fewer carbon emissions will provide increasing 

levels of productivity. Effective centralized control will allow a greater ability to prioritize the use of aircraft but 

only to the extent that timely and accurate intelligence exists. Real time information is required to quickly and 

effectively respond to new fire incidents and rapidly changing fire situations. Faster containment of threat fires and 

better management of large fire events will result in reduce costs. Also, national implementation of the Automated 

Flight Following system will lead to improved aircraft location, information and flight tracking, resulting in 

utilization efficiencies and increased safety margins for crews. 
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Human aiding technology, including the Military C4 ISR concept (Command Control Communication Computer/

Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance), can be applied to activities such as resource ordering, mapping, radio 

frequency management, weather forecasting, and requesting Temporary Flight Restrictions using real time uplinks to and from aircraft, further increasing aviation efficiency. This concept is compatible with existing large fire 

support and initial attack, fire use monitoring, aerial resource command and control lead planes, national airspace 

coordination and border patrol and homeland security missions. This further contributes to a coordinated response 

to national emergencies by all federal, state, and local agencies.

Both the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior have significant fire program dollars invested in 

developing new systems to support program needs in analysis, geospatial analysis, resource allocation, and 

predictive services. Advancements in new systems technology present significant issues to the fire agencies. 

Rising development and life-cycle costs, employee training, and system deployment costs further erode the funds 

available for firefighting and fuel management resources. Also, ever increasing systems security requirements 

make gaining access for all federal, state, tribal and local fire agency personnel difficult.

In an era of flat budgets, agencies must find innovative methods to increase opportunities for science and 

technology. Agencies must expand partnerships with other science and technology organizations such as NASA, 

the National Institute for Standards & Technology, and the military to leverage research and technology dollars, 

and become more efficient in incorporating new science and technology into the programs.

For the programs in fire and fuel management to be where they need to be in the next decade, new and innovative 

thinking will have to occur. Future wildland fire programs will depend heavily on technology and the predictive 

tools to conduct sound analytical analysis of aviation needs in support of agency resource management missions.
1

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Appendix A

References

A Collaborative Approach for Reducing Wildland Fire Risks to Communities and the Environment – 10 Year 

Strategy Implementation Plan. Western Governors Association, December 2006

Audit Reports: Forest Service Large Wildfire Costs. U. S. Department of Agriculture, Office of the Inspector General June 2006 

Climate Change: Agencies Should Develop Guidance for Addressing the Effects of Federal Land and Water Resources. The U.S. Government Accountability Office August 2007

Large Fire Suppression Costs: Strategies for Cost Management. Wildland Fire Leadership Council, Strategic Issue Panel, 2004 (The Brookings Institution Center for Public Policy Education)

Managing the Impacts of Wildfire on Communities and the Environment – A Report to the President in Response 

to the Wildfires of 2000.” Fire and Aviation Management, USDA Forest Service

QFR Fire Research Forum- Fire Management in a New Era: New Assumptions and Strategies for the Future.

(Transcript - The Brookings Institution Center for Public Policy Education) November 2007

Quadrennial Fire and Fuel Review Final Report 2005. National Wildfire Coordinating Group Executive Board 

July 2005

Report of 2004 U. S. Forest Service Large Wildfire Cost Review Independent Panel. FY 2004 Large Cost Wildfires Report (The Ferraro Reports) March 2005

Report of 2005 U. S. Forest Service Large Wildfire Cost Review Independent Panel. 

FY 2005 Large Cost Wildfires (The Ferraro Reports) May 2006

Report of 2006 U. S. Forest Service Large Wildfire Cost Review Independent Panel 

Towards a Collaborative Cost Management Strategy (Referred to as the Brookings Reports) May 2007

Report of 2007 U. S. Forest Service & Department of the Interior Large Wildfire Cost Review Independent Panel. 

Assessing Progress Toward an Integrated Risk and Cost Fire Management Strategy (Referred to as The Brookings 

Reports) May 2008

Ten-Year Comprehensive Strategy. Western Governors Association, 2001

The Changing Roles and Needs of Local, Rural, and Volunteer Fire Departments in the Wildland Urban Interface.

National Association of State Foresters, 2003

Appendix A -
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The Future of Wildland Fire Management: Advance Briefing Report For the Quadrennial Fire Review Working 

Panels. (Report - The Brookings Institution Center for Public Policy Education) January 2008

The Public and Wildland Fire Management: Social Science Findings for Managers. USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station, November 2006

Wildland Fire Management: Important Progress Has Been Made, but Challenges Remain to Completing a Cohesive Strategy. U.S. Government Accountability Office, January 2005

Wildland Fire Management: Forest Service and Interior Need to Specify Steps and a Schedule for Identifying 

Long-Term Options and Their Costs. U.S. Government Accountability Office, February 2005

Wildland Fire Management: Update on Federal Agency Efforts to Develop a Cohesive Strategy to Address 

Threats. U.S. Government Accountability Office, May 2006

Wildland Fire Management: Interagency Budget Tool Needs Further Development to Fully Meet Key Objectives. 

U.S. Government Accountability Office, November 2008

Wildfire Suppression- Funding Transfers Cause Project Cancellations and Delays, Strained Relationships, and 

Management Disruptions. U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2004

**************************************************************

Research Note: Numerous studies, articles, and academic and research reviews were referenced in the production 

of the Advance Research Briefing Report along with in depth presentations by various researchers. To list them all 

would require a separate bibliography. The QFR Research will be posted on the NIFC.gov website along with the 

2005 and 2009 QFR Final Reports.

Appendix A -
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Appendix B

Quadrennial Fire Review Methodology

Following the release of the 2005 QFR report, the fire community partners took steps to bolster the QFR both as 

a future strategy development process and as a planning tool for enterprise performance objectives. The partners 

generally recognized that the 2005 report – in large part because it was the first quadrennial review conducted 

– essentially would be a baseline document. Still, it was useful (and certainly prescient) to have an interagency 

strategy document projecting that the remainder of the decade would likely result in a period of both more wildfire 

and larger wildfires with potentially significant impacts. The driving factors singled out in the 2005 report leading 

to this elevated plateau of wildfire activity were neither new or unknown to many in the research community and 

the field, but the QFR succinctly stated the mission strategy case for how fire management needed to and was 

responding to “ensuring fire’s role in ecosystem sustainability” and “promoting fire adapted communities” in the 

wildland urban interface.

In terms of institutionalizing the QFR process, the federal fire agencies committed to a three-fold approach for 

the 2009 report. First, participation in the QFR process was broadened to promote integration of fire management 

future strategy into the larger land management functions and urban interface communities and networks. 

Beginning most importantly with the coordinating group for the QFR – The Integration Panel -- the membership 

was overhauled to ensure that it included line officers, resource program managers, researchers, and especially 

state, tribal, and local representatives. One-third of the composition of the agency and partner working groups and 

panels who were to review the research, develop the mission alternatives and new strategies, and produce the final 

report was set aside for non-fire or non-federal members. 

The second part of the approach was to expand the involvement of research. A first phase (actually completed 

in 2007), was added to produce a “synthesis report” based on research and futuring about the wildland fire 

environment. Federal, academic, and other research institutions nationally and internationally were engaged in 

trying to understand how ecosystems are changing in response to climate, ecological, social, and economic forces. 

Over 25 representatives of the research community addressed how these changes are both affecting wildland fire 

and being affected by wildfire. In early 2008, an “Advance Briefing Report” was released summarizing this work 

-- “to provide a range of ideas about possible futures and prospects for change in the wildland fire environment.” 

A third and final aspect involved extending the reach of new ideas and issues that would be addressed by the 

working panels. The core work done in a quadrennial review is to have outside panels explore alternative 

strategies, assess scenarios, and submit recommendations for building new capabilities, strategy shifts, and 

changes in tactics. In the 2005 QFR, the panels all reviewed current capabilities and future challenges for the 

purpose of preparing mission alternative strategies, but each working panel had a separate domain of questions 

to focus on, that in part based its proposals on the cumulative work of the preceding panels. Working panels 

were also given the opportunity to develop shadow strategies and counter proposals to ensure a robust review of 

alternatives. 

This was changed for the 2009 QFR process. The panels all worked concurrently and independently. In spring 

2008 when this second phase of the QFR working panels was established, panels were given broad domains 

to explore and asked to prepare numerous future options. In total, the panels then prepared nearly 30 scenarios 

Appendix B -
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and after consultation with the Integration Panel, refocused their efforts on one or two more developed strategy 

alternatives. While the final QFR final report is a blend of panel new thinking and in some cases new mediums, it 

is worth briefly denoting the original panel domains and the “issues list” they worked with below.

QFR 2009 Working Panels 

Panel 1 - Suppression Strategy in the Era of Asymmetric fire 

Building Scalability and Flexibility for Suppression Response for Irregular Fire

(AMR, Megafires, Cost Containment, Ecology & Fire Risk Issues)

Panel 2 - Fire Management on the Edges

Integration of Fire Management within Fuels and Restoration Governance 

(Fuels outside of Fire, Restoration, Stabilization, Biofuels, Smoke etc)

Panel 3 Achieving Fire-adapted Communities

Reaching the Next Level of Supporting Adapting Communities to Wildland Fire Risk 

(Landscape Defense, Zoning, WUI Limitation, CWPP, Homeowner Role)

Panel 4- Fire’s Emergency Response Role in Preparing for “Unknown Unknowns” 

Reshaping Emergency Response to cope with New Demands/risks 

(Pandemics, Mega-community Response, Pyro-terrorism, Major Natural Disasters)

Panel 5- Reimaging Information & Education of Fire in Web 2.0 world

Creating New Mediums and Messages on Fire Risk, Prevention, and Wildfire Education

(Fire blogs, Internet Fire Channel, New Media and Internet Interactions, Social Networking)

As with the 2005 QFR, the Integration Panel organized all the panel results into coherent sets of alternatives 

and developed the integrated strategic vision for the final report. After producing a synthesis of the overall vision, 

mission strategies and requisite core capabilities, the panel members reviewed prepared chapters summarizing the 

structure, workforce capacities, and operational and system assets for the QFR Comment Report Draft. A 30 day 

field internal comment period was conducted in November. 

The Integration Panel reviewed all comments before submission to the Senior Steering Group for final approval. 

The senior steering group is the NWCG-Executive Board (NWCG-EB) consisting of the fire directors of the 

five federal agencies and the fire director from the National Association of State Foresters (NASF), who are the 

signatories for this 2009 QFR final report.

Appendix B -
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Appendix C 

QFR Panels and Acknowledgements

Integration Panel

U.S. Forest Service Members

Rich Lasko, Co-Chair

Mike Hilbruner, Research Chair 

Janet Anderson, Sandy Cantler, Maggie Doherty, Steve Gage, Neal Hitchcock, Merrie Johnson, Patti Koppenal, Sue A Stewart, Denny Truesdale, Tom Zimmerman

Department of the Interior Members

Brian McManus (FWS) 

Tim Murphy (BLM) Co-Chairs, 

Doug Alexander (NPS), Glen Claypool (BLM), Sue Husari (NPS), Jim Kelton (FWS), Ken Kerr (BLM), Tom 

Nichols (NPS), Bryan Rice (BIA), John Segar (FWS), Bodie Shaw (BIA,) Dave Whitmer, BLM-Alaska

State and Local and Line Officer Members

Ken Arney (USFS), Don Artley, NASF (Former Montana state forester), Bob Ashworth (State of Nevada), 

Craig Axtell, (NPS), Tom Koontz (Red Lodge, Montana) Kurt Latipow (Washoe County Nevada, representing 

IAFC), Bob Leaverton (USFS), David Utley, Florida State Forestry

Working Panels

QFR Panel 1 – Suppression Strategy in the Era of Asymmetric Fire 

Co-chairs: Ken Kerr (BLM), Doug Alexander (NPS), Steve Gage (USFS)

Pete Bloom (State of Colorado), Mark Boche (USFS), Alan Carter (FWS), Jim Fenwood (USFS), Bill 

Hahnenberg (BLM), Sam Hescock (USFS), Chris Marks (NPS), Josh Mathiesen (USFS), Bruce Suenram, 

(NASF)

QFR Panel 2 – Fire Management on the Edges (Fuels & Restoration)

Co-Chairs: Patti Koppenol (USFS), Jim Kelton (FWS)

Mike Brown (North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District and International Association of Fire Chiefs), J. Bruggink (USFS), 

Shane Del Grosso (FWS), Mark Gray (State of Washington), Russ Graham (USFS - Research Advisor) Dennis Haddow (FWS), Clint Kyhl (USFS), Brad Washa (BLM)

Appendix C -
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QFR

QFR Panel 3 – Achieving Fire-adapted Communities

Co-Chairs Don Artley (NASF), Sue Stewart (USFS)

Clint Cross (USFS), Kurt Latipow (Washone County, NV), Tim Melchert (USFS), Pam Leschack

(USFS), Sarah McCaffrey (USFS - Research Advisor), Mike Roos (BLM), Michelle Steinberg (NFPA), David 

Utley (State of Florida) Kim Vanhemelryck (FWS)

QFR Panel 4 – Fire’s Role in Preparing for Emergency Response and Unknowns 

Co-chairs: Janet Anderson (USFS), Bob Leaverton (USFS) 

Roger Boykin (FWS), John Caffin (USFS), Dave Driscoll (IAFC), Joe Freeland (BLM), Darryl Jones (South 

Carolina), Buck Latapie, (Consultant), Rich Wands (Consultant) 

 QFR Panel 5 – Reimaging Information and Education of Fire in Web 2.0 World

Co-chairs: Bryan Rice (BIA-AK) Paula Nasiatka (USFS NAFRI)

Gary Greenberg, (Consultant), Don Hannenmann (State of Texas), Kelly Hetzler (San Carlos Apache Tribal), 

Wayne Mitchell (CALFIRE), Barb Perkins (FWS) , Don Smurthwaite (BLM)

Research Panel Members 

Chair: Mike Hilbruner USFS Assistant Director, Fire Research 

Eric Berg - US Geological Survey

Elisabeth Brouwers - US Geological Survey

Colin Hardy - US Forest Service

Rich Lasko - US Forest Service

William (Ruddy) E. Mell - National Institute of Standards and Technology

Sarah M. McCaffrey - US Forest Service

Carol Miller - US Forest Service

Jeffrey P. Prestemon - US Forest Service

David V. Sandberg - Sam’s FireWorks

John R Shelly - University of California at Berkeley

Tim Swedberg - National Interagency Fire Center, Joint Fire Science Program

R. Gordon Schmidt (Senior Consulting Advisor- Brookings Institution)

Appendix C -
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Research Forum Senior Advisors

H Bowman - Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Tim Brown - Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nevada

Susan G. Conard - USFS Research and Development

Mark A. Finney - USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station 

M. D. Flannigan - Canadian Forest Service 

Eileen Forrester – Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute

Sarah McCaffrey - USFS Northern Research Station

Ron Neilson - USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station

Steve Palmquist – Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute 

Mike Pellant - BLM ,Great Basin Restoration Initiative 

Matt Rollins - USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station

Sue Stewart - USFS Northern Research Station 

Brian J Stocks - Canadian Forest Service

National Advanced Fire and Resource Institution Staff

Merrie Johnson (Director), Maria Anderson, Julie Smith, Eric Steele, Ben Mucha, 

QFR Process Consultants

Dr A. C. Hyde, Senior Consulting and Project Director, 

Brookings Institution, Center for Public Policy Education

Mark Beighley, Senior Advisor and Co-consultant 

Appendix C -