Stephen Feinberg

Stephen Feinberg is a financier and government official who co-founded Cerberus Capital Management, a major private equity firm with long-standing holdings in defence and aerospace. He served as chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board during the first Trump administration before taking office as the 36th Deputy Secretary of Defense in 2025.

Feinberg sits at the top of the Pentagon’s new drone coordination structure: the newly created autonomy czar position — responsible for consolidating nearly all unmanned systems efforts across the services — reports directly to him, placing him at the centre of the US military’s push to integrate autonomous systems at scale.