I worked for the US Forest Service for 31+ years, and have a fair amount of experience fighting wildland fires. The article posted by MuirWannabe has a lot of truth to it. The Forest Service and the state wildfire agencies have generally followed a policy of suppressing all (or at least most) wildfires for 70+ years now, but there are a lot of reasons that policy exists (and it's not science........science would dictate that many of these fires be allowed to let burn, especially in areas like California, since that is what would happen without man's influence). BUT - If the Forest Service were to suggest letting some wildfires burn - especially those anywhere near people live - you can imagine the outcry and the political ramifications that would occur. The first time a fire was allowed to burn, resulting in a bunch of expensive homes being burned up (and it would happen, trust me), the political pressure would ramp up fast, and that would be the end of letting wildfires burn. And this situation has gotten worse in recent decades, with more and more people building homes in forested areas that are prone to burning periodically. People love to live in those scenic areas, and don't understand that there home is actually in the middle of a tinderbox. So, as a result, most fires have been suppressed when they should have been allowed to burn, allowing fuels to build up to unnatural levels on many thousands of acres throughout the West.
To add to the problem, climate change is now a reality, resulting in prolonged drought conditions, and higher-then-normal temperatures in California and other places, drying out these fuels and setting up the conditions for catastrophic wildfire, once there is an ignition source.
So..........it is a complex problem, folks, with no easy answers. As the article said, reducing fuels on a million + acres (actually many millions of acres, througout the West) through prescribed burns is just not feasible, and even if a significant number of those acres could somehow be treated, climate change is occurring (and getting worse), so the stage is still set for large, disastrous fires to ignite and burn in these areas.
Bottom line - without addressing climate change, any attempts to significantly reduce the fire hazard throughout the West are doomed to fail. In addition to that, though, we need to somehow find a way to let more wildfires burn, as nature intended, rather than trying to suppress all wildfires as soon as they start. I don't know how we do that, though,( in a country where people love to build big homes next to flammable forests) and neither does anyone else, which is why that part of the problem only gets worse.