Expected future scenarios including climate change, a greater incidence of urban conflagrations, and continued fuel-load accumulations will increase demands on the wildfire management system in the United States, resulting in increased difficulty managing wildfires. There is a need to expand concepts of effectiveness to manage more extreme and complex events.

Fires nominally managed under the same defined strategy (for example, full suppression) can have widely divergent resource needs, tactics, and timeframes. The increase in hazards during wildfire operations is leading to shifts in how fires are engaged, even when rapid containment is the most desired objective. The need to improve systems of understanding, developing, and communicating wildfire strategies is a key source of leverage to mitigate the consequences of increasing workload and complexity on a system under duress.

Ensuring sound strategy is essential as wildfire response systems continue to be tested by these pressures. However, these issues, as well as many unforeseen, will challenge our ability to effectively convey the rationale behind a chosen strategy, connect it to outcomes, and learn from it.

The current understanding and approach for developing and communicating wildfire response strategy is insufficient to meet these challenges.

Arguably, some of these issues are systemic and originate at least in part from the current framing of the problem, in which the wildfire itself is the problem.

There is an urgent need to convene greater dialog within the fire management community around the idea and application of strategy. Given the recent evolutions in strategic guidance, now is an opportune time. The USDA Forest Service issued a Wildfire Crisis Strategy in early 2022 that emphasizes returning fire to fire-prone forests. The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy was updated in 2023 with an addendum that also identifies a need to increase the use of proactive fire. The US Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commissioner’s final report similarly echoes these aims. The wildland fire community has a unique window of opportunity to capitalize on the convergence and momentum of these calls for change.