Some of what you suggest is being done by fire departments and companies but there are complications that make the problem more difficult than it may seem:<p>* We don't currently have the satellites to monitor fires at both small scale and real time. Geostationary (real time) satellites have a resolution of ~1km, and higher resolution satellites of ~10m to ~1m may only make a pass once per day.<p>* The FAA imposes flight restrictions around wildfires and doesn't make exceptions for research or scrappy startups, so it's tough to experiment or go to market with drone-based monitoring or firefighting.<p>* A lot of research has been done into fire spread prediction, including some using AI, but it's a difficult problem. Like weather forecasting it's pretty accurate on short time horizons, but over many hours and days errors compound.<p>* Data. High resolution fuel data is needed, which changes every season as vegetation changes, and changes every day with the weather. Quality elevation data is needed. We don't have much ground-truth data of what's going on inside a wildfire.<p>Finally, we have a combination of: forest fires are natural, suppressing them increases future likelihood of fire, people are building houses in fire-prone areas, climate change is increasing the frequency of fires.<p>We could probably do more to reduce the loss of life due to fire, but the biggest problems are social rather than technical: we need to reduce our impact on the climate, stop building houses in high-risk areas, and not get NIMBY about prescribed burns and forest management.