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Old 10-05-2020, 12:27 PM
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Arrow The Doomsday Plan: How the Military Responds When the President Can't Fulfill His Dut

The Doomsday Plan: How the Military Responds When the President Can't Fulfill His Duties
By: Garrett M. Gaff - Esquire News - 10-05-20
Re: https://www.esquire.com/news-politic...ess-explained/

In the event that Donald Trump can’t do his job, a long and complex set of procedures begin to unravel.

As word of President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis first spread on Thursday night, an amateur plane spotter in Hawaii noticed online what he thought were two suspicious flights: Navy planes, known as E-6B Mercurys, aloft on both the East coast and the West coast.

The E-6Bs are unique in the U.S. fleet, part of its nuclear command-and-control structure and intended to communicate missile-launch orders to the nation’s hidden submarine fleet in the event of a surprise nuclear attack. Their presence Thursday night seemed to indicate the U.S. wanted to discourage a foreign adversary like Russia or China from seizing the geopolitical advantage of uncertainty about the president’s health. “It’s a message to the small group of adversaries with SLBMs and ICBMs,” the plane spotter, Tim Hogan, tweeted, using the acronyms for submarine-launched and land-based ballistic missiles.

The Pentagon quickly denied the flights were in any way related to the president’s condition, saying they were routine and normal. A spokesperson for Strategic Command, which oversees the nation’s nuclear forces, said: “I can confirm these E-6 were pre-planned missions. Any timing to the president’s announcement was purely coincidental.” The U.S. does keep airborne command planes in the air regularly to guard against surprise attacks—but the comment from Strategic Command is also what you’d expect them to say if the flights weren’t routine. The U.S. government isn’t in the habit of saying, “Yes, we energized and exercised our nuclear command structure to warn off a foreign nation’s surprise nuclear attack.”

The suspicions about the flights hinted at a larger question: What exactly is the U.S. doing in a moment of uncertainty about its presidential leadership? President Trump is receiving treatment for COVID-19 at Walter Reed Medical Center, and despite his doctors’ overly optimistic statements, questions are swirling about the severity of his illness. At the moment, no one in government is saying—on the record or off—that the president cannot carry out his duties. Still, a president sick with a deadly virus sets off waves of discussions and actions through the military, intelligence community, and diplomatic corps to broadcast steadiness to our allies and adversaries alike. The public detects nearly none of it.

Understanding the short-term or long-term transfer of power to the vice president—who under the 25th Amendment would become “acting president” for the duration of the time a president is unable to discharge the duties of the office—requires thinking through the answers to three big questions: What does the vice president need to know to fulfill the duties of the presidency? How do you prove there’s a new commander-in-chief? And who needs to be assured that the U.S. government is functional?

The answers to those questions, as is often the case with the government’s Doomsday and emergency contingency plans, is weirder than people imagine.

What Does the Vice President Need to Know?

The U.S. government doesn’t think of the commander-in-chief as a single person—instead, it thinks of what is known as a “Office of the Presidency,” a living, breathing entity larger than any one person. Nearly every aspect of continuity planning examines the questions of presidential succession through the lens of nuclear weapons: who has moment-to-moment control of the world-ending arsenal of 400 ballistic missiles, 14 missile submarines, and fleets of bombers, all ready to launch on a moment’s notice. The extensive, expensive system of military and communications apparatus that surrounds the presidency—what’s known as the National Command Authorities—is designed to ensure that someone, somewhere is always in charge of those weapons. The first nuclear ballistic missiles are set to leave their silos just four minutes after a verified presidential launch order, so there’s no time to be hunting for the next president.

The transfer of power, temporarily or permanently, to a vice president is the easiest question for the system to handle—and there’s good reason to believe that under the current circumstances Mike Pence might be a uniquely steadying hand for the U.S. government after the chaos of Donald Trump and his public and private rants against the “Deep State.”

“He comes in with that congressional background and he’s much easier to engage with. The intensity level just drops,” explains a senior national security official, who asked to speak anonymously to discuss sensitive areas of contingency planning. “He trusts the intelligence professionals—he may have his own skepticism—but my impression is he has the faith in the intelligence world and the military world. He doesn’t have the baggage the president has. You don’t worry about walking on eggshells. He’s a traditional policymaker.”

A short-term transfer of power—a procedure laid out in the 25th Amendment for instances like a medical procedure requiring anesthesia—wouldn’t likely require any change in posture by the apparatus around the vice president, nor any specific new briefings. On a daily basis, the vice president is surrounded by a smaller version of the military entourage and communications systems used by the president. A rotating set of military aides are always close at hand with the vice president’s own nuclear “football” briefcase, and the vice president has his own “biscuit,” the sealed codes to initiate a nuclear strike.

However, any long-term transfer of power or even the anticipation of a longer-term transfer of presidential authority would likely launch a series of refreshers, briefings, staff reassignments, and security procedures to help ease the vice president into the role of “acting president.”

Believe it or not, vice presidents are often better briefed on current intelligence and geopolitics than presidents. While all modern vice presidents have also received the morning “Presidential Daily Brief,” recent occupants of the office—including Al Gore, Dick Cheney, and Joe Biden—typically have asked for and received their own supplemental materials, diving deeper into certain areas of their own interest or receiving additional briefings separate from the president’s morning intelligence briefing, which vice presidents often attend as well.

It is theoretically and historically possible that closely-held “compartmented” intelligence would be shared with the president but not the vice president—for instance, the identity of certain intelligence sources overseas—but such information, says David Preiss, a former presidential briefer and author of the President’s Book of Secrets, a history of presidential intelligence, “would be few and far between.” There’s only been one publicly known occurrence of such information—an intelligence agent’s identity during the Carter administration that CIA director Stansfield Turner would only share with the president himself. As a constitutional officer, Pence has no standard security clearance and is entitled to any information he needs.

The most immediate questions facing “Acting President Pence” would stem from any ongoing or planned covert action operations the U.S. had in the works; Pentagon and intelligence briefers would try to fill him in quickly on any decisions he might be asked to make: for instance, approving a special forces raid to rescue kidnapped hostages, an offensive cyber operation against a foreign adversary, or a planned drone strike against a terror suspect. Such decisions semi-routinely land on the president’s desk, often with go/no-go decisions unfolding in tight time constraints, and a key goal in getting the vice president up to speed would be ensuring he was prepped to make fast decisions if they were needed.

If Pence were to appear set to be “acting president” for an extended period as the president was being treated for Covid-19, there would likely be refresher briefings for him on nuclear launch procedures, evacuation measures, and other information that would have been presented early in the administration during the transition but not necessarily repeated frequently in recent years.

How Do You Prove There’s a New President?

During the Reagan years, emergency planners inside the government built out a highly secret, advanced Doomsday plan known as the Presidential Successor Support System (PS3). The PS3 plans involved spreading various Cabinet-level successors to different facilities—airborne command posts, mountain bunkers, and other mobile command-and-control units.

The mobile units were convoys of special EMP-hardened, lead-lined tractor-trailers—some of which were based at the Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant about 150 miles west of Omaha—that would spread out across the vast American west. Known as the Enduring Battle Management Support Center, the unit’s shoulder patch hinted at its Doomsday mission: A grim reaper sneaking through the night carrying a lightning bolt.

The PS3 name came from the fact that each Doomsday command post, whether bunker, airplane, or tractor-trailer, would be staffed by a “support system” for the presidential successor who ended up there. In the ‘80s, for instance, top U.S. officials, including Senate leader Howard H. Baker, Jr., CIA Director Richard Helms, United Nations ambassador Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, Cabinet Secretary James R. Schlesinger, and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were all on standby to be whisked from their lives as private citizens to be waiting in the Doomsday command posts for a potential presidential successor. The plan, simply put, was for folks like the agriculture secretary or commerce secretary to be evacuated to a command post, where they would find someone like Rumsfeld already waiting to be the new acting president’s chief of staff or other top advisor.

But, planners wondered, how would you prove to a foreign adversary, like the then-Soviet Union, that a no-name Cabinet secretary was actually the new acting president? How do you prove even to the Pentagon and the military chain of command that this person, in a mountain bunker or somewhere on the side of a Colorado highway, is the rightful successor to the presidency?

Enter FEMA. The agency best known as the civilian disaster response team for hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or fires actually got its start in nuclear Doomsday planning and continues to have a large classified mission watching over the presidential line of succession and maintaining relocation facilities like the president’s own city-sized bunker at Mount Weather, in Berryville, Virginia. For years, it ran what was known as the Central Locator System, which tracked the whereabouts of the nation’s presidential successors day-to-day (the program was subsequently renamed and updated to include an internet-based system during the Obama administration); FEMA in a crisis would work to determine quickly who was the highest-ranking, surviving presidential successor and then FEMA and the military would link that person to the global communications systems necessary to act as commander-in-chief.

While the precise mechanisms for locating presidential successors and determining who is the highest-ranking official to survive remain classified, it’s known to involve both tracking devices as well as specific authentication codes. “There’s an elaborate system for the people in this network, first of all, to verify each other’s identity,” former National Security Council aide Richard Clarke explained in a 2006 interview. “That person on the other end has a certain password and information that they have to pass for us to believe that they’re who they say they are.”

Once the presidential successor is proved to the U.S. government itself, planners considered how to prove to foreign adversaries that a new commander was in charge of the nation’s military. One plan was to telegraph and announce certain military maneuvers or actions in advance—a test of command similar to the one that the U.S. applies to new leaders in other countries following a coup. For instance, a new “acting president” might communicate to an adversary to watch a certain location. Then a U.S. submarine would surface there shortly. Such an action would demonstrate clearly that the presidential successor was in full control of the nation’s nuclear forces.

How Do You Communicate There’s a New President, Acting or Permanent?

The third question around contingency and emergency planning returns to the question of those E-6B Mercury flights—what messages should the U.S. government send to allies and adversaries to ensure that the U.S. is functioning and engaged on the world stage? The question has both an offensive and defensive component to it: The government in moments of instability and uncertainty needs to project that now is not the moment to mess with the United States, nor is it a good time for adversaries to be rambunctious elsewhere on the world stage.

Such overtures would be conducted primarily through existing diplomatic channels and the network of defense attachés in U.S. embassies around the world, reaching out to both allies and adversaries to underscore that the U.S. was stable and secure. “The defense attachés and ambassadors would signal via a direct conversation—they wouldn’t say ‘Don’t fuck with us,’ but they would send that message,” says a senior national security official.

Depending on the precise geopolitical environment at the time of a transition, the U.S. military might also move to a higher readiness level, known as “Defense Condition” or DEFCON, or lock-down bases under more localized counterterrorism threat levels, known as THREATCON. While DEFCON levels are a key plot point in many movies, actually formally raising the military readiness level is extremely rare.

In the hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for instance, U.S. military commanders around the world took the initiative to raise their own readiness levels, but the Pentagon and Lyndon Johnson stopped short of formerly raising the DEFCON status. Similarly, following the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger ordered additional security measures but didn’t move the DEFCON status. The most analogous situation might be the tangled political moment that accompanied the Yom Kippur war, which began 47 years ago on Tuesday. Richard Nixon was facing both the heat of Watergate as well as a bribery scandal around his vice president, Spiro Agnew, that would ultimately force Agnew to resign later that month. Fearful that the Soviet Union would intervene in the brief, fiery surprise war when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, the U.S. raised its DEFCON level to 3, from a peacetime DEFCON 5.

Foreign leaders understand, too, the vulnerabilities that come with such moments. On the morning of September 11, 2001, both the U.S. and Russian militaries were holding large-scale exercises; after the attacks, one of the first phone calls into the White House came from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who offered condolences and told National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that he was grounding Russia’s fleet for the day to avoid any misunderstandings as the U.S. raised its alert level. “Putin was fantastic that day. He was a different Vladimir Putin in 2001,” White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told me years ago. “America could have had no better ally on September 11th than Russia and Putin.”

While Putin did send perfunctory best wishes to Trump on Friday, telling him, “I am confident that your inherent vitality, good spirits and optimism will help you cope with this dangerous virus,” today Putin and Russia would be more likely to try to seize the advantage than offer a helping hand—particularly given the proximity of the presidential election. To forestall such thinking, U.S. intelligence officials predict that in a transition the government would likely move quickly to funnel messages through allies like Israel (to Russia) or Switzerland (to Iran) to discourage any attempt to take advantage of the U.S. instability. The acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Florida Republican Marco Rubio, tweeted Friday: “Any adversary who views news of @POTUS testing positive as an opportunity to test the United States would be making a grave mistake.”

U.S. defense and diplomatic officials would also likely quickly make the rounds of key allied capitals—think London, Tokyo, Berlin, and Canberra—to demonstrate calm and control at the helm of the nation’s ship of state. Some of that work already appears to be going on: Defense Secretary Mark Esper wrapped up a preplanned weekend of stops around the Mediterranean on Sunday, but did so under unusual security precautions, asking reporters not to mention three of his four stops until he had already left the country.

Depending on the exact geopolitical environment at the time of such a transition, the U.S. might also do precisely what that Hawaiian plane spotter suspected—moving certain air and naval assets around visibly to demonstrate the U.S. was alert. In the modern environment, that could especially mean moving additional naval resources toward the Pacific and Southeast Asia, where China’s ongoing aggressiveness in the South China Sea has worried policymakers over the last two decades. “You’d just be more visible where [our allies] felt vulnerable,” the senior official explains. “You wouldn’t seek to be provocative.”

More than anything, the U.S. posture would be simply to discourage any actions on the global stage and preserve the status quo.

Status quo is the goal of each stage of the contingency planning. If the system works as designed, if the vice president knows what he needs to, if the U.S. government knows clearly who to listen to in an emergency, and allies and adversaries are confident that someone—whoever it is—still has his or her finger on the proverbial button, it shouldn’t matter to anyone who is president of the United States at any given moment.

Whether that premise holds true in the age of Donald Trump, though, is anyone’s guess.

About this writer: Garrett M Graff, a distinguished journalist and bestselling historian, covers politics, technology, and national security; he previously edited both Washingtonian and POLITICO Magazine and is the author, among other works, of The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, and Raven Rock, about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans.
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O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
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