Trump's Air Force One Debacle Leaves The U.S. With A Weaker Wartime Command Post

Yahoo

a day ago

WASHINGTON — If Donald Trump wants someone to blame for his still having to ride around in a 40-year-old Air Force One, he might consider starting with a long look in the mirror.
And if Americans want someone to blame for their future presidents being saddled with a plane lacking a key wartime capability, they should consider taking a long look at the current president.
The drama surrounding Trump's turn to the Qatari royal family for a 747 luxurious enough to meet his needs as he attacks Boeing for not finishing replacement jets quickly enough hides a pair of simple facts: The entire debacle began with Trump's self-image as a top-notch 'deal maker,' and his meddling will leave future presidents with planes unable to refuel in flight, severely degrading their utility in an actual war.
Before he even took office the first time in 2017, Trump was already boasting that he would force Boeing — which had been on pace to deliver two new, purpose-built 747s by the end of that term — to slash its contract price.
To meet Trump's demands, the Air Force agreed to abandon a process already years in progress and instead purchase and retrofit two already built planes whose buyer had gone bankrupt. Among the features dropped from the required specifications list was in-flight refueling, thereby reducing the amount of time a commander-in-chief can remain aloft to only about 15 hours, rather than a week or more.
If a plane carrying the president cannot refuel in midair, that severely limits how and where a president can travel and be kept out of harm's way in the event of a major attack on the United States.
'That was a decision that was not made by the Air Force but made by the White House,' then-Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford told senators at a hearing in 2017, conceding that, in the event of an attack on the United States, the lack of midair refueling capabilities 'will certainly be a limiting factor and we'll have to plan accordingly.'
What's more, it's unclear whether Trump's interference in the program will have saved taxpayers a dime. While the 'fixed price' contract means that Boeing was forced to absorb their cost overruns, the delays Trump caused have required the Air Force to spend millions more on repairs and upkeep of the existing 747s that entered service under George H. W. Bush in 1990.
And none of that includes the new burden taxpayers must now bear to transform Qatar's gift to Trump — the most expensive ever given by a foreign nation to an American president and an apparent violation of the Constitution's clear prohibition against them — into an Air Force One before he takes it with him to his presidential library when he leaves office, as he says he intends to do.
Modifying the plane could take many months or even years, meaning those hundreds of millions of dollars or more will be spent so Trump can use the plane for as little as several months or potentially not at all, assuming that he, in fact, leaves office in 2029 as the Constitution requires.
White House officials did not respond to HuffPost queries on this topic, and the Air Force said the contract to modify the Qatari jet for Trump's interim use was deemed classified, even though it has previously put out routine press releases on the Air Force One program.
Trump himself, in a discussion of Qatar's jet with Fox News host Sean Hannity, said he wanted the new plane because the current Air Force One is not big and 'impressive' enough.
'When you land and you see Saudi Arabia and you see UAE and you see Qatar and you see all these, and they have these brand-new Boeing 747s mostly, and you see ours next to it,' Trump said en route to the Arabian Peninsula earlier this month. 'It's much smaller, it's much less impressive.'
Military aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia pointed out that all the problems with the program are entirely of Trump's making, and that had the president kept his hands off the process that began during the Obama administration, he would likely already be flying in the replacement planes.
'This was Trump trying to look like a great negotiator,' Aboulafia said. 'Almost certainly he'd be flying in a new jet now.'
Like so much involving U.S. policy and controversy in recent years, it began with a Trump tweet.
'Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!' he wrote a month after winning the 2016 election for president, but a good six weeks before taking office.
Trump had built his reputation by depicting a smart and savvy businessman as the host of the reality show 'The Apprentice,' and his declaration that the U.S. government was being taken advantage of by Boeing in its still-under-negotiation contract for two replacement Air Force One jets pushed that same theme.
'I don't want a plane to fly around in that costs $4.2 billion,' he told an audience at one of his rallies in Pennsylvania 10 days later. 'We're going to cut the price way down ― way, way down.'
Trump for years has presented himself as an expert on aircraft, possibly because he has owned some and briefly ran a small airline before it went under, yet expresses views that suggest he is not. For example, he once bragged that his personal Boeing 757 was actually larger than Air Force One, even though it was 75 feet shorter in length and a fraction of the weight.
In any event, Trump's vows to save money on the new Air Force One contract led Boeing's CEO to travel to Trump's country club home in Palm Beach, Florida, to lay out options for reducing costs for the two planes. Trump, barely a month after taking office, was already boasting he had cut $1 billion from the price. (The White House within weeks reduced the claimed savings to 'millions.')
Part of the plan was to acquire the planes on the cheap. The Russian airline Transaero had ordered two 747-8s but had subsequently gone bankrupt. The planes were being stored in the Mojave Desert to avoid corrosion, and Boeing was eager to unload them. While the final sale price was never disclosed, it was believed the government paid considerably less than the $380 million per plane list price.
But the primary mission of the jets that serve as Air Force One is actually to serve as command-and-control military platforms, if the need arises, and acquiring fuselages is a mere first step.
The existing pair of 747-200s was built in the mid- and late-1980s and put in service in 1990. They have the plumbing for in-flight refueling, shielded electronics against the electromagnetic pulses from nuclear weapons blasts, advanced systems for encrypted communications, several different countermeasures against missiles and the ability to generate enough electricity to power it all. All these and likely more were on the list of features that the Air Force had wanted in the new 747s.
It turns out, though, that tearing down an already completed passenger liner and installing the required configuration and equipment was considerably more difficult than building a new one 'in-line' at Boeing's assembly plant in Everett, Washington.
Aboulafia compared it to building a house from scratch with all the amenities you want planned in ahead of time, compared to buying an existing house and having to tear out walls and floors, replacing all the wiring, plumbing and duct work and then finishing everything out.
'It's extremely difficult to do as a retrofit,' he said of the major modifications needed. 'It's much easier to do that in-line.'
Among the first features to be dropped in the new contract was the in-flight refueling, a major structural modification which would have required new pipes running from where a flying tanker's fueling boom attaches on a jet's nose and then down and aft to the fuel tanks. Other changes were made, too, such as a reduction in power generation capacity to run all the systems and using Boeing's standard environmental control system rather than a specialized one.
Trump then insisted on a new red, white and dark blue color scheme to replace the iconic light blue and polished silver that Air Force Ones have had since the 1960s, but an analysis found dark blue paint on the bottom of the plane would cause excessive heating on sensitive components. The new colors were scrapped during the Biden administration, and it is unclear if Trump will once again insist on his preferred paint job.
In late 2016, the Air Force was estimating the new 747-8s, built from scratch, would be in service by 2023 or 2024 — more or less matching the timeframe required by the ones delivered in 1990.
By late 2024, the Air Force was estimating that the two retrofitted planes acquired in 2017 — their interiors and systems torn down and rebuilt — would be ready by 2028 or 2029, possibly later.
Because Trump demanded Boeing sign a fixed-price contract, the company began losing money at the start of the coronavirus pandemic because of supply chain disruptions and a shortage of skilled workers with the requisite security clearance. By 2023, its losses on the $3.9 billion contract it had been coerced into by Trump neared $2 billion.
'A very unique set of risks that Boeing probably shouldn't have taken,' CEO David Calhoun, who replaced the Boeing executive who had struck the deal with Trump, conceded in a 2022 earnings call. 'But we are where we are.'
Trump, while lying about how much money he has 'saved' — he told Hannity that Boeing's not-yet-finalized contract in late 2016 was worth $5.7 billion, rather than the $4.2 billion even he was citing at the time — still regularly blames Boeing.
'I'm not happy with Boeing,' Trump told reporters traveling with him on Air Force One on Feb. 19, then hinted at the efforts that were already underway to solicit a plane from Qatar. 'We may do something else. We may go and buy a plane, or get a plane or something.'
Trump's degradation of Air Force One as a military asset, ironically, comes as he simultaneously boasts of making 'war-fighting' the top priority at the Defense Department, which he accuses of having gone soft under predecessor Joe Biden.
As a young man, Trump had the opportunity to serve in Vietnam but avoided doing so by producing a diagnosis of 'bone spurs' from a doctor friendly with his father. As a candidate for president in 2015, he disparaged Sen. John McCain, who spent nearly six years in a Hanoi prison, as 'not a war hero.' And as president, he called service members who die for their country 'suckers' and 'losers,' according to his own former chief of staff.
Despite this, he continues to regale his audiences about his 2018 visit to Iraq aboard Air Force One — with no running lights and window shades drawn ― as a feat of tremendous courage, even though similar trips had been done by presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama while Biden had visited Ukraine and Israel, two active war zones not under the control of the U.S. military, a first for a commander-in-chief.
'I got out of the plane and actually asked my people, 'You know,' I said, 'Excuse me, I was very brave sitting in that cockpit. Am I allowed to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor?'' Trump said at a February speech in Miami Beach.
Since winning back the presidency in November, Trump and his defense secretary, former Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth, have regularly bragged that they are bringing back a 'warrior' ethos at the Pentagon to put the top priority on 'war-fighting.'
Yet Trump, by interjecting himself into the details of a technical contract, has made the future Air Force One planes from Boeing less capable war-fighting platforms than the current ones, with potentially an even less capable version poised to enter service, depending on how much or little is done to the Qatari plane.
Air Force procurement officer Darlene Costello told Congress in testimony earlier this year that even more easing of requirements might be done to let one of the two already ordered planes enter service in 2027, although she provided no details.
It is unclear whether Trump much cares about that aspect compared to the impression his plane leaves on his fellow world leaders.
'We're the United States of America, I believe that we should have the most impressive plane,' Trump told Hannity.
'Apparently looking good is more important than protecting the country,' Aboulafia said, adding that he still cannot wrap his head around a president flying around in a plane that had been owned and run by a foreign government. 'It would be a major flying security risk.'