CDF is part of the State of California, Resources Agency, an entity overseeing components of state government including the Department of Parks and Recreation, Department of Fish and Game, and the Department of Water Resources. The Department or Forestry works with employees of California Conservation Corps for firefighting and vegetation management. CDF uses inmate labor of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to assist with fire suppression and logistics. Programs to control wood boring insects and diseases of trees are under forestry programs managed by CDF. The vehicle fleet is managed from an office in Davis, California. The Department's Director is Ruben Grijalva, who previously served as State Fire Marshal and as Fire Chief of the City of Palo Alto.

CDF operations can be viewed as fitting into two categories: Schedule B and others. Schedule B is defined as Resources Agency/CDF-funded. Examples of non-Schedule B activities include county fire departments run by CDF under contracts with county governments. From north to south, Butte, Tuolumne, Merced, and Riverside counties are examples of county fire departments operated by CDF under contract. Another commonly-heard CDF term is SRA which refers to State Responsibility Area: lands or area for which CDF has the primary responsibility to manage the public safety during a fire incident.

Operational Units are organizations designed to address fire suppression over a geographic area. They vary widely in size and terrain.

For example, Lassen-Modoc Operational Unit encompasses two rural counties and consists of eight fire stations and 13 pieces of equipment. The unit shares an interagency dispatch center with federal agencies including the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. An interagency center contributes to economies of scale, supports cooperation, and lends itself to a more seamless operation. The area has fragmented jurisdictions across a large rural area along the Nevada and Oregon state lines.

Riverside Operational Unit is one of the larger units with 91 fire stations with about 230 pieces of equipment. Some of these stations belong to the county fire department, which is operated by CDF under contract. The unit operates its own dispatch center in Perris. Terrain served includes urban and suburban areas of the Inland Empire and communities in the metropolitan Palm Springs area. The area includes forested mountains, the Colorado River basin, the Mojave Desert and Interstate 10.

Lawmakers in Sacramento have mandated that every Operational Unit develop and implement an annual fire management plan. The plan will develop cooperation and community programs to reduce damage from, and costs of, fires in California. One metric used by fire suppression units is initial attack success: fires stopped by the initial resources, (equipment and people,) sent to the incident.

CDF uses several enterprise IT systems to manage operations. Altaris CAD, a computer-assisted dispatch system made by Northrop Grumman, is employed to track available resources and assignments. Each Ranger Unit has a stand-alone system which includes detailed address and mapping information. Information about fires is batch-uploaded into a statewide statistical analysis system which is used to drive improvements to fire suppression and prevention. Resource Ordering Status System is used to cooperatively manage equipment and staff from other agencies at campaign-type fires.

The three largest state government land-mobile radio systems would include California Highway Patrol, California Department of Transportation (CalTrans), and California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Any of these three systems might be considered largest depending on what constitutes the factors of "largest." If some combination of the number of mobiles, overall number of transmitters, total number of users, annual number of incidents, number of radio transmissions carried, or geographic area served were considerations, one of these three would be largest.

CDF is a major user on the State of California, Department of General Services, Public Safety Microwave Network (PSMN). The network is used for the state's Green Phone telephone network, a telephone system used for communications between public safety agencies. The system primarily serves state agencies. Intercoms between dispatching centers use audio paths supported by microwave radio. These intercoms usually appear as circuits on communications consoles in dispatching centers.

Aircraft are a prominent feature of CDF, especially during the summer fire season. Both fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft are employed. Helicopters, or rotary-wing aircraft, are used to transport firefighting hand crews into fire areas. They also drop water and retardant chemicals on fires. Fixed wing aircraft are used for command, observation, and to drop retardant chemicals on fires.

Hearing a distant voice from a radio speaker, it was unclear what path the caller was using to reach you. This was especially true of dispatch consoles, which routed audio from many channels to one or two speakers. Radio protocol provided that users announce which channel and tone they were using in order that the called party would answer on the same channel and tone. A typical transmission where an engine was calling, preparing to tell something to dispatch, might be phrased, "San Andreas, Forty Six Eighty Eight, Local Net, Tone One." This queued the San Andreas dispatcher to manually select Local, Tone One or L1 to answer.