The U.S. federal wildland fire management system continues to experience rises in the number of acres burned annually and increases in management expenditures surrounded by firefighter death and injury. Despite a wealth of relevant academic research regarding wildland firefighting operations, a prominent nexus of these dynamics, there is little research regarding the response organization used to facilitate these operations on the fireground. Owing to a lack of research, wildland firefighting operations have remained a black box, meaning something with unknown internal workings, between the top of the response organization and the environment. From the perspective of systems thinking, the absence of a complete understanding of wildland firefighting operations prevents the dynamics of the larger domestic federal wildland fire management system from being holistically understood. In response to this gap in knowledge, this thesis explores wildland firefighting operations from an organizational perspective through a secondary analysis of qualitative data.