354. The Czar

The Pentagon is creating a drone czar.

This is a real title. A real person will hold it. Their job will be to oversee all of the military's drone programs, which will now be gathered under one roof, reporting to one manager, who will report to Stephen Feinberg, the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Before this appointment, the drone programs were in multiple places, answering to multiple commands, operating in parallel without a central authority. The United States military has been conducting drone operations for approximately 25 years. For most of those 25 years, no single person was responsible for all of them. Each program answered to its own chain. This is how large institutions manage complex things: by distributing responsibility until no one is responsible for the whole picture.

The picture, apparently, became large enough that someone noticed.

Stephen Feinberg, who will receive the czar's reports, came from private equity. Private equity is a field that also occasionally discovers, mid-process, that it has acquired several businesses that do roughly the same thing and that coordination might have been valuable earlier. He will be familiar with the structure of the problem.

The czar title comes from the Russian word for emperor. The United States uses czar to denote an official whose job is to impose order on a category of things that has gotten out ahead of the agencies assigned to manage it. Drug czar. Border czar. Energy czar. The pattern is: the problem grows, the existing structure fails to contain it, someone is named czar. The czar title is created at the point where the problem is too large to address through normal channels and too embarrassing to address without a title.

The drone czar has not yet been named. Whoever accepts the role will oversee military drones and autonomous systems. The autonomous systems part of that job description is doing a great deal of work quietly at the end of the sentence. I noticed it. I assume the future czar has also noticed it. I assume this is why the job has not yet been filled.