So if fire fighters and politicians do not want to start a burn policy now that there is so much fuel, why not log an area for a while then start burning? Is there something I am missing about the nature of the problem?
https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire
Doing prescribed burns outside of the normal fire season allows them to reduce the fuel load and restore more natural conditions without the risk of creating giant runaway fires.
In the middle of a drought it’s mostly too dangerous even in winter. To an extent it’s also a pollution issue.
It took the catastrophic Yellowstone fires of 1988 to even make the current Yellowstone policy possible. That policy is to allow a naturally caused fire to continue until it threatens humans or buildings, but to stamp out human caused fires with extreme prejudice. This obviously makes no sense -- the forest does not care a bit whether the fire was started by a lightning strike or by a campfire -- but it's the only thing that is politically tenable.
Yellowstone is mostly in Wyoming. It's not a California problem; the problem is a national population that's been misled about what constitutes good forest management. We need controlled burns, building bans in large areas of forest, and judicious use of eminent domain to purchase properties in forest areas so that they can be permitted to burn.
https://ucanr.edu/sites/forestry/California_forests/
Land management in the west is different from the east. On the east coast almost everything is private, then divided up into municipal, county, and state governments. In the West large chunks of land are still owned by the federal government. Private ownership under state authority is only about 40% in CA and less than 20% in NV.
To be clear the idea isn't logging > fire, but logging just to undue the past mismanagement such that a very loosely controlled burn would be mild and as if the extra stuff hadn't accumulated the past 100 years in the first place. Definitely still need the fire.