A Crucible For Pentagon’s New Way Of Warfighting

After years of experimentation, America is edging closer to formalizing how the Pentagon’s modern warfighting tools can best support firefighters during wildfire emergencies. Given the accelerating shift in how the modern U.S. military fights—relying on intelligence and decision support tools to maximize effects on the battlefield—a new strategy to help the Pentagon engage with civil authorities during wildfire season is long overdue.

The time is right. Firefighters are changing the way they fight wildfires, aligning with Pentagon’s current warfighting approach. Safe, efficient firefighting is always a goal, but firefighters in wildfire country are increasingly eager to prevent wildfires or to detect and tackle blazes early, before they become community-destroying mega-fires. And now that the Pentagon has finally joined the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, wildfire stakeholders throughout the Federal government can start working with the Pentagon to figure out how the Pentagon’s battlefield assets and military warfighting strategies might help.

Ideally, Pentagon support would be oriented towards building something akin to a firefighting NORAD or a fire-based supplement to the National Weather Service (NWS), focused on evaluating risk, speeding wildfire detection times and accelerating wildfire response throughout the nation.

While some in the Services might consider support to civil authorities a tiresome,“woke” distraction from lethality, wildfires offer the modern military some great training. Every fire season, the Pentagon stands to get tough, reimbursable, and unscripted opportunities to test their latest collaborative battle-network strategies, field test their newer rapid-deployment tools, and work through the complex challenges of data sharing, where information derived by the nation’s most secretive assets must be analyzed, declassified, and distributed in a matter of seconds.

It is a robust environment to test gear. Wildfire fighting asks an enormous amount from equipment, and, if a Pentagon tool is effective and able to survive wildfire season, it is likely ready for the battlefield.

NORAD, But For Wildfires

Crafting or supporting a wildfire-oriented NORAD/NWS would be a big change in how the Department of Defense traditionally supports civilian authorities during fire season. But the Pentagon has been here before. In the past, visionary base and area commanders were left to figure out—on their own—how to best support civilian wildfire fighters during a crisis.

Two decades ago, as the first big wildfires and firestorms of California’s long string of droughts started boiling up in the Southern California hills, locals had to push the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton to reach into their “iron mountain” of Southern California-based gear and unleash their local helicopters for civil support.

After a few initial hiccups, the process got ironed out. Once fires got too big for California’s firefighters to handle alone, the firefighters would request Federal help, and shortly thereafter, CH-46 Sea Knights or other Marine Corps helicopters—emblazoned with temporary identification numbers in hi-viz red paint—trundled into action, toting water-carrying “Bambi Buckets” to and from the fire line, dousing hotspots. After the fires, accountants would get together and hash out state reimbursements for Federal costs.

That collegial process still works, but it is no longer effective. Both military and firefighting doctrines have changed, supporting a faster, more intelligence-informed way of engaging. It has radically transformed the way the military contributed to wildfires. As California’s years-long drought really took hold, helping spawn California’s infamous “Fire Siege” of 2020, the swarms of Southern California-based CH-46 “Phrogs” disappeared, finally retiring for good in 2015.

The MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor, the Marine Corps replacement for the old Sea Knights, was un-suited for the traditional way the Marine Corps had helped fight large wildfires in the past. With Bambi Buckets wasted on the MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor, rotary wing support was largely passed off to the State of California and private-sector contractors. Cal Fire alone operates a fleet of more than sixty firefighting helicopters and aircraft.

For its part, the military made fire-fighting contributions where it could, emphasizing “strategic” level water-bombing support from National Guard-operated C-130 Hercules transport aircraft equipped with Modular Airborne Fire Fighting Systems, providing manpower and back-office support to government response teams when needed.

But it wasn’t enough.

After the catastrophic 2018 Camp Fire consumed four towns, killing at least 85 people and inflicting more than $16 billion in financial losses, lawmakers looked to the military for more help.

In response, the Pentagon began the FireGuard program, a process that employs military satellites and sensor platforms to “detect wildfires, notify authorities, and create products to disseminate to firefighting networks nationwide.” FireGuard leverages geospatial and other—often secret—tools, running sensor outputs through a “Firefly” AI program to gain near-real-time insights on firefighting risk and fire behavior. The final product is scrubbed and sanitized to reduce chances of inadvertently revealing secret U.S. capabilities, and then disseminated to local firefighters on the ground.

These programs are working, but they face a perilous and uncertain future. Every year, wildfire-prone states must lobby for Federal resources, and even proven programs like FireGuard risk being defunded.

White House Leadership Needed

At a Federal level, guidelines governing U.S. support to civil authorities have not kept up with the times. Wildfire doctrine has shifted, focusing on prevention, or, failing that, endeavoring to extinguish fires before they become enormous megafire conflagrations. Too often, by the time Federal assets arrive at a wildfire, the battle has already been lost and the damage has already been done.

At this point, the White House must redefine what, exactly, a wildfire emergency is. With wildfires, Federal aid cannot simply be reactive, arriving to help fight a big fire and support recovery efforts. The costs are simply too high. Instead, the White House must try getting ahead of wildfire season—declaring proactive emergency declarations, and allow the Pentagon to work with local and state firefighters over the course of fire season, working to identify transient local changes in fire risk, and identifying and responding to fires faster.

To better determine the value of such early interventions, AI-based modeling can map out how extinguished fires might have progressed without intervention, determining how much damage those fires would have done without Pentagon assistance.

The White House might also consider seeing how these tools might work overseas, when they are unencumbered by domestic rules and regulations. Over the past few years Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada have lost a lot to wildfires, and, like the U.S., they all are increasingly prone to extremely damaging and fast-developing firestorms. Leveraging AUKUS or other cooperative agreements to fight fires may prove a very fruitful way to test collaborative warfighting systems and build operational commonality while the Pentagon works with an array of new partners to figure out what might—and might not—work at home.