I don’t think the Commander In Chief is a civilian. If he were he wouldn’t salute the Marines at Marine 1 or the AF folks at AF1
As Commander in Chief Biden should be court-martialed for treason, for giving aid to our enemies.
Good pooint but I’ve always heard that the United States armed forces are led by a civilian commander-in-chief although I agree that as he acts as CIC he is part of the armed forces.
President is the Sr. Civilian Leader.
The protocol got inherited from a time long ago when the Civilian leadership knew their position of power came from 2 places, the loyalty of the armed services not to the leaders, but to the nation and the trust the nation through voting put in the civilian leadership. The president is in service to the citizens to be that suprema commander, but it is the citizens in control. If voting is not trustworthy the entire chain is very weak, and each party knows it very well. If the senate was still chosen by the state government and state constitutional process we would not be in this mess. Guess we are in a countdown to balanced budget, unfortunately it will be forced by our creditors no matter how many ships we have in our navy and planes in our air force. Everything both parties call Freedom will die in a credit crisis.
Actually, the saluting came in with Reagan, who supposedly saluted a Marine when boarding AF1 at the start of his term and then asked, “am I supposed to salute you?” The Marine said, “I don’t think we’d mind if you do, sir.”
However, it’s standard practice now. I think the hand over heart gesture is now used for some other ceremony.