Vermont is standing up a formal wildland fire management program for its National Guard training lands, a quiet but significant shift in how the state thinks about a hazard most Vermonters have never considered a serious local threat.
The Vermont Military Department, which oversees the Vermont National Guard, is seeking contractors to build out the program under the Pentagon's Integrated Wildland Fire Management framework. That framework requires military installations with wildfire risk to develop plans covering prevention, suppression, prescribed burning and post-fire recovery.
The National Guard's principal training lands, including Camp Ethan Allen Training Site in Jericho and the Ethan Allen Firing Range, sit within large tracts of forested terrain where live-fire exercises and munitions use create real ignition risk. Vermont is roughly 75% forested, the fourth-highest share of any state, and much of that forest abuts rural communities with limited firefighting capacity.
Source: NationGraph.
For most of its history, Vermont's wet climate made catastrophic wildfire seem like someone else's problem. That assumption has been eroding. The Northeast is warming faster than most of the continental United States, and Vermont has cycled through significant drought conditions in 2020, 2022 and stretches of 2023 and 2024. The Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation recorded spikes in wildfire activity during those dry periods. Then, in summer 2023, smoke from Canadian wildfires settled over the state for days, giving residents an unusually direct encounter with what large-scale fire looks like even at a distance.
The National Guard Bureau has been pressing state Guard units to bring their lands into compliance with DoD fire management standards, and this program appears to be Vermont catching up. Other northeastern states, including New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, have been quietly building similar wildfire capacity in recent years.
Contract value and the full scope of work were not publicly visible in the posted record. The solicitation was posted Sept. 10, 2026, through the Vermont Business Registry.
