I’m sure trump knows plenty of people with their own private jets, so he’d have no problem fleeing. I wish he would. And take Pence with him. It’d be worth whatever amount of money he stole. However much it would be, it’ll still be less than $5B.
Point taken. I guess I should have elaborated a little bit. . . there are prescribed checklists for notification/action when National Assets are employed (i.e. a VC-25); other support agencies would know of the request for flight, and would at least ask, “Well, what does POTUS/AF1 need in support?” Defecto-POTUS would have to already have a convincing cover story on why he doesn’t need additional support aircraft, and that would leave a lot of scratching heads.
The POTUS is a private citizen before he takes office, is a private citizen acting in the capacity of the POTUS while in office, and becomes a private citizen after he leaves office. If he/she’d applied for a passport prior to assuming office, then he/she’s got one. I don’t know the specific diplomatic protocol for foreign nations’ entry visas for a POTUS, but I do know the USSS and State Dept. handle all the paperwork. I would doubt there’s “hot ‘n’ sexy passport/visa action” for visiting heads of State. But I had two passports–my normal ‘blue’ touristy passport, and different colored one that was stamped “The bearer is on official travel on behalf of the US Government.” Theoretically the POTUS could have multiple passports, but the question stands, “The POTUS is worldwide recognizable. Do we bother with a passport for entries? Can we just spare the paperwork?”
The Enlisted member can go around the defection-planning officer to the next higher level in the Chain of Command. Or they can go to their Inspector General. Or their Congress member. There are multiple ways to raise a red flag.
Benedict Arnold pre-dated the UCMJ by centuries. Did you mean that other defections were fresh in mind when the UCMJ was written?
Tripler
POTUS is openly recognizable. He ain’t flying anywhere that easily.
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Benedict Arnold pre-dated the UCMJ by centuries. Did you mean that other defections were fresh in mind when the UCMJ was written?
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Didn’t realize the UCMJ was so recent. Though does it share much/any text with the Articles of War that predated it ?(and do go back to the revolutionary era)
Wait an enlisted man on the Soviet/Korean/Chinese/Iranian border can really say “Sorry sir, I am not obeying that order until I have ran it past my congressman in Idaho”
Tripler, you’ve done a lot to point out all the difficulties involved and I appreciate that. So I must ask: instead of explaining why a particular hairbrained scheme won’t work, is there a reasonable set of orders that the commander in chief could issue that would allow this to work? He has the ultimate authority over hundreds of thousands of people. If you were in Trumps shoes and determined not to go to prison and you believed that Putin would keep promises made to you in private*, how would you attempt to accomplish this?
*admittedly this is a bit of mental gymnastics. Only an utter moron would trust Putin and I’m saying you should be both in his shoes and yet not be an utter moron.
I remember a Time magazine article about a trip by President Reagan to Japan back in the day. It included a picture of his passport, with the standard dark-blue cover, as I remember. Not sure if the President still needs one for international travel (or if Reagan actually needed one back then).
There might be head scratching but could anything be done about it? The POTUS says I am ordering to you, as commander in chief, to ignore usual support protocol/checklists and fly this baby to Moscow right now. What options are there but say “yes, sir”.
There’s the fact there’s top secret, state of the art comm gear on board. Not to mention the electronic countermeasures and defensive whatevers.
Could someone refuse on a national security basis?
The Russians/Soviets have a pretty good record of looking after defectors. Kim Philby and the like were perfectly well taken care of. His main complaint that is his KGB rank was purely honorary and he was not allowed near any actual KGB intelligence operations (not something I imagine Trump would be concerned about, unless the last half century has been an elaborate deep-cover operation and he’s actually a committed intelligence operative 
)
And I’m sure 21st Russian could take care of a corrupt capitalist far better than soviet union ever could.
I don’t think that Heads of State, in general, need passports.
And if you’re in the military, and an officer above you is trying to defect, and you know that, then any orders he’s giving to that effect are illegal orders which you shouldn’t follow. But the catch is, unless the officer says or does something really stupid, you won’t know that that’s his purpose.
This. It’s a matter of duty to refuse to follow unlawful orders. Knowing is the hard part.
I will tack on that IME senior non-commissioned officers have a superpower when it comes to dealing with officers. Even when an order seems to merely be unwise, but lawful, they’ll generally let you know. The First Sergeant who was my acting Command Sergeant Major for a while would usually announce his desire to discuss my decisionmaking with the same phrase. “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me, sir!”
He’s on the plane and his phone still works. On Twitter: “SAD WORLD INDEED THAT I HAVE TO DEFECT TO RUSSIA! MUELLER CAN SUCK IT!”
True. With that said, the USA can offer a lot to entice Russia to hand over a defector this high profile. He’s orders of magnitude more visible.
And I think you don’t really have any idea how anything actually works in government service. Trump can go up to a pilot for Air Force One (who are all Air Force officers, typically at the O-6 level, and therefore under the President’s direct authority) and command him or her to fly the aircraft to Russia, but there is far more than just the pilot and copilot who are necessary to load and operate the aircraft. At a minimum, the aircraft has to be serviced (fueled and inspected), flight plans filed with the FAA and the ICAO (as well as the host country and anyplace else the plane may need to land for fuel and service), and of course for the flight orders to percolate through the appropriate Air Force leadership so that it can be confirmed and approved, regardless of dispensing with any of other logistical and security issues. These things just doing happen with a snap of fingers, even if Trump could manage to make his tiny digits audibly snap. Unless he has managed to secure all six Infinity Stones and a gauntlet to use them, he’s still going to be at the mercy of the same bureaucratic inertia that has infuriated presidents and generals from the time of George Washington.
Trump could, of course, charter a private flight and do whatever he pleases, and the Secret Service can object but not restrain him. But Air Force One is a very expensive piece of government property, and its use is constrained by the organization which is responsible for it and their former procedures and processes for flying and servicing it.
Also, just to make the point clear, while Putin is no doubt enjoying the spectacle of Donald Trump bumbling and fumbling his way across the international stage and damaging relations between the United States and its closest strategic allies, he in no way wants any responsibility for protecting Trump or giving him safe harbor from persecution. Trump better pick a neutral state with no extradition treaty with the United States in this hypothetical scenario, because there are really pretty few nations he can turn to that he hasn’t explicitly denigrated. Maybe that is his true motivation for that stupid “Space Force”?
Stranger
But these things do, in fact, sometimes happen with a snap of the finger, because sometimes they need to. In the event of an attack, for instance, they get the President into the air ASAP to make him a harder target. And in order to be able to do that, they must have planes available which are already fully prepped for flight. If the President walked out onto the tarmac and ordered one of those planes up, they could do it, because it’s their job to be able to do that.
The crew of AF-1 will probably not take the plane up without a large packet of official paperwork. And even if they could be persuaded (“I saw Dave. You could be a double. How can I be sure you really are who you say you are?” exposes the moment of whimsy to a great deal of bureaucracy), they still have to get past the tower. Would an Air Force pilot take off without tower clearance? It seems unlikely. There are just too many ways it could fail.
But none of those things (except the fuel, and we can imagine for the purposes of this hypothetical that it is fully fueled for whatever reason) are actually REQUIRED to make the flight. Whatever the red tape says there is no physical reason why the pilots couldn’t just take off and fly to Moscow (a post further up cited 7800 miles as the max range of AF1, more than enough to reach Moscow from DC).
And presumably in an actual emergency (like an incoming nuclear missile) the executive branch could ignore all those things and just GTFO sharpish.
What other countries between Russia and the US could do is another matter. The Secretary of Defense could politely point out to Norway (or whichever country is over flown) that whatever the constitution does or doesn’t say about who is commander in chief, no one in the US military is going to object if Air Force One is forced land and taken into Norwegian custody.
According to this article (admittedly from a long time ago–pre-9/11!) the POTUS does need a passport, and gets a diplomatic “black cover” one. Under normal circumstances, though, he wouldn’t have to actually handle his passport, or stand in line to get the little stamps put in it; he has people to do that for him.
The Queen does not need a passport. Since British passports are issued “in the Name of Her Majesty” it would be redundant. (I guess she could just scribble down her own passport on a napkin from the airport bar: “Let me in. [signed] The Queen.”)
Since the United States is a republic, even the President does still need a passport, although he gets the black-cover diplomatic one. The Secretary of State of the United States is not requesting safe passage “in the name of the President of the United States”, but rather on behalf of the United States of America as a whole, of which even the President is in the end merely a citizen.
I guess the answer to the OP boils down to, would an air force pilot, if ordered to do so, ignore all the paperwork (military and civilian) associated with taking off and flying to Russia.
Would ordering the pilots to ignore all the red tape (and the guy in the tower saying “why are you taking off, stop it!”), and just take off, constitute an illegal order? What would make that order less illegal if they were ordered to do so in a legitimate emergency?
The airborne command post for POTUS is called the National Airborne Operations Center (formerly the National Emergency Airborne Command Post or “NECAP”). These modified Boeing E-4 aircraft are based out of Offutt AFB in Nebraska, and of the current fleet only two aircraft are operational and are deployed to Andrews AFB or wherever the President is traveling to as needed, e.g. if there appears to be a potential threat or need. They are not maintained on ready alert for immediate take off, and if there were a credible threat the President and family (and Vice President, et cetera) would likely be moved to a secure location (either the large bunker underneath the White House or nearby Camp David which also has provisions from attack up to a nearby nuclear strike) rather than transported to the NAOC. And there is no way that the NAOC is just going to make a beeline flight to Russia, Presidential command or no, because its entire function and that of its crew is to preserve operational security under strategic threat. It has a specific operational plan which includes staying as far away from direct threats as possible.
There are, of course, other aircraft at nearby Andrews AFB that could be scrambled by executive order and flown directly to Russia. I’m sure they have some C-130s which, fully fueled are just at the limit of the great circle distance to Sheremetyevo International Airport. But then, I want to meet this hypothetical Air Force pilot who will testify that, “The President hopped on board and told me to fly him direct to Moscow so…I did.” I want to hear his story about the beachfront property he also agreed to purchase with his life savings while en route.
Okay, in this hypothetical world where you and Trump live in which when the President issues a command everybody just snaps to and damn the consequences to their careers and freedom, Trump could order up a fully fueled plane to land at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and fly him direct to the loving arms of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. In the real fucking world where everybody on Planet Earth actually lives, there is no way this happens without a lot of people going, “So, you want to do what, again? And when? And why?” As Trump has discovered, “Because I say so!” doesn’t work as justification, even for the President of the United States when it comes to decisions more significant than ordering a meal or firing an intern.
Stranger