The President doesn’t just decide who to kill, though. He relies on advisers, and delegates a lot to commanders in the field. Power is distributed throughout the chain of command, in both the afferent and efferent directions: higher-ups live in a world of information almost entirely constructed by what lower-downs tell them, and in turn must rely on the competence of individual contributors to implement policy.
For that matter, a lot of management responsibility amounts to letting people do their thing, then backing them up when they encounter trouble.
The President doesn’t just decide who to kill, though. He relies on advisers, and delegates a lot to commanders in the field. Power is distributed throughout the chain of command, in both the afferent and efferent directions: higher-ups live in a world of information almost entirely constructed by what lower-downs tell them, and in turn must rely on the competence of individual contributors to implement policy.
For that matter, a lot of management responsibility amounts to letting people do their thing, then backing them up when they encounter trouble.
That is all true. My point was that the drone operator isn’t particularly powerful in this whole scheme.