Pay no attention to the leader of the free world in that $1.5 million armored limo. He, the waving flags, the brazen sirens, the line of 30-odd vehicles bristling with guns, agents, hazardous material mitigation equipment, and press vans---they’re distractions, really.
If you want to understand how the presidential motorcade moves around a city like a billionaire through the primaries, watch what's happening on the fringes, in the complex and intricately choreographed dance that is protecting the president and his entourage.
A glance at your playbill will reveal the dancers: the Secret Service, police escorts, White House staffers, the principal (in this case, POTUS). And, of course, the bad guys. It’s their threat, specific or not-so-specific, real or imagined, that motivates this whole enterprise.
The ballet starts with some serious training. The local cops appearing in the show probably started studying in a classroom, and might have practiced formations and protocols on foot with an instructor before being allowed anywhere near a motorcycle or a car.
The Secret Service will have gamed out the route well ahead of time, scouting for chokepoints, shortcuts, and details as tiny as, “Will the sun be in our eyes as we drive this road?” (If so, it’s that much harder to spot threats, and reason to choose another path.)
Agents have also, incidentally, attended months of firearm and protection training. The suited person at the wheel has definitely completed a specialized protective driving course---perhaps even a few. "Protective driving skills are perishable," says Diana Chery, who trains security professionals in such things. "The learning process is continuous." Agents have also given White House staffers the spiel on what to expect. Even POTUS receives a mandatory briefing on how to behave if something goes wrong. Don’t get in our way as we keep you alive, bub.
Once the motorcade's moving, the first rule is do not stop. Drive quickly (maybe even twice the speed limit) but smoothly. "Imagine the protectee with an open coffee cup sitting on his lap," Scot Walker, a former federal agent who now runs security at a private firm, writes in a guide for protective drivers. "If it spills you are probably driving too aggressively."
If you're watching a motorcade blast through your city, it's likely following one of two basic formations. In each case, the nucleus of the motorcade---the principal and everyone else in a car---barrels forward. The real action is at the edges, where police escorts of local cops do their work.
The first strategy is mostly used beyond the nation's capital, where local drivers and police aren't accustomed to a speeding president. Especially since 9/11, the folks planning these high-speed parades tend to favor the "hard stop"---straight-up shutting down streets, your commute be damned.
Cops on motorcycles block traffic at each intersection so no one, not even errant cyclists, can wiggle onto the main route. Once the entourage has passed, those cops twist the throttle and "leapfrog" the whole affair to block the next intersection. This is dangerous work: Motorcycle escorts can hit 90 mph on city streets. One motorcycle-mounted officer died and one was seriously injured while protecting President Barack Obama during his administration. Still, it keeps the principal totally cocooned (the major goal here) and lets local traffic resume its movement in the motorcade's wake.
In places like Washington, DC, however, local drivers and well-tested police escorts know what’s up, so motorcades can move move with a lighter touch. "The people in the greater [DC] metropolitan area are trained that when they hear the sirens, they see the motorcycles, they know they’ve got to move---there’s an escort coming,” says Jeff Capps, a former motor sergeant with the US Park Police. (Ditch the Dudley Do-Right image in your head: These are the folks leading the police escort around the capital whenever the prez is headed toward federal land, like, say, the National Mall.)
Instead of shutting everything down, the motorcycling escorts play Moses. The first rider pushes traffic out of the middle of the road, those behind him form a wedge, gradually knocking everyone to either curb, and opening a bus-sized hole in traffic. Through the hole goes the president of the United States.
There's a third motorcade option, too, one that's more frequently used to protect officials overseas. If agents are short on armored cars, sometimes they prefer to nix the bells and whistles in favor of a stealthier approach. Drivers in these mini-motorcades will use defensive moves, like simply not allowing cars to cut in between them or straddling lanes to ensure others aren't too close. Kindly drivers, they are not, but these techniques keep the protectee safe and aren't too obvious to observers.
Agents might even send out a dummy motorcade to keep surveilling bad guys off their tracks. "It’s the shell game," says Tom Dorsch, a former diplomatic security special agent with the State Department who has trained protective services in places like Iraq, Liberia, and Colombia. “You keep the bad guys guessing about the exact location of a VIP, in the event of a car bomb or ambush.”
Despite all the careful choreo, sometimes motorcades demand UCB-level improv, because VIPs aren't just very important---they're powerful politicians who tend to do whatever they want. Something as simple as the president having a sudden hankering for a burger, or beckoning the secretary of state into his car for a traveling meeting can cause security headaches. What do the secretary’s protective agents do? Where does her motorcade go? Months of training and drills, and there can still be confusion.
But there’s good news, says Dorsch: “If the VIP makes a sudden change, if you didn’t know that it was coming, chances are the bad guys didn’t know either.” In dance and in motorcades, there are no rules.
