The answer provided by Mr Thom's maths was to chop down old trees, which foresters said they knew anyway.
Meghalaya's enormous forest cover is community-owned, but timber merchants often bypass the local leaders to strike up deals with foresters.
The infestation is gathering pace: foresters fear that by 2013 four-fifths of British Columbia's central-southern pine forest will be gone.
Such deliberate scorchings are a routine part of forest management, but foresters use them sparingly, for fear of losing control.
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The soldiers, some from the former Sherwood Foresters regiment, have fired thousands of rounds during their three months in the region.
The 22nd (Cheshire) Regiment, the Staffordshire Regiment and the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters combined as the Mercian Regiment as part of the Army's infantry restructuring plans.
For foresters, these few hours of daylight are a brief opportunity to make their own mark on the landscape and to tame the wilderness as much as they can.
Some forest scientists trace the current outbreak to 1994, when provincial-government foresters, fearing the ire of greens, failed to eradicate a small infestation in a provincial park by cutting and burning.
Mr Kouchner said many of the soldiers responsible were "Foresters" - residents of the Guinee Forestiere region of south-eastern Guinea - and that he had heard they were "recently reinforced by Liberian troops, former mercenaries".
Then Ecosign sends foresters and surveyors equipped with GPS, topographical maps and compasses to the slopes to scramble the steep trails, marking central reference lines with flagging tape, determining boundaries and figuring out where trees need to be removed.
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