Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  In 1998, at the request of the Department of Transportation, the National Association of Corrosion Engineers began estimating the cost of corrosion. By the summer of 2001, NACE figured that the military cost alone amounted to $20 billion. Before NACE published its study, it sent Cliff Johnson, the organization’s public affairs guy, to Washington to see about taking action. The way NACE saw it, just applying what we already knew could save six of those billions. At the US Senate Armed Services Committee, Johnson was directed to the staffers on the Subcommittee on Readiness and Management. There were two staffers. One covered military construction. The other, who covered everything else, had just arrived on Capitol Hill. Her name was Maren Leed, and though she was only thirty years old, she was a former fellow at RAND Corporation, the defense-oriented think-tank, with a doctorate in quantitative policy analysis. As it happened, she’d also worked as an analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and was hunting for a signature issue for the new ranking member on the committee. That was Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii—a state very much victimized by military corrosion.

  Looking into military corrosion, Leed found “a huge cost-sink for the department that nobody talks about or cares about.” She became convinced that incentives at the department were set up wrong, that institutional biases made fixing the problem nearly impossible, and that the issue wasn’t getting appropriate attention. Inquiring with the DOD’s Office of Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L) about the matter, she got no reply. The way she saw it, in response to corrosion, the DOD was doing bubkes. When corrosion matters in the Pentagon were handled, they were distributed to people in four different offices, in logistics, research, engineering, and infrastructure, but to nobody in the OSD. The branches of the military were even more scattered. Navy officers in one ocean didn’t know what navy officers in another were doing. Sailors working on similar problems didn’t know each other and certainly didn’t know about similar problems in other branches. For all the navy knew, the army might have had aircraft carriers.

  At a committee-wide meeting, when colleagues around the table pitched initiatives about acquisition reform or Afghanistan, Leed proposed corrosion. Akaka liked it and got behind it. In March 2002, Senator Akaka officially proposed creating a separate corrosion officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He proposed that this corrosion officer be a political appointee, confirmed by the Senate, reporting directly to the undersecretary. The officer would need to compile databases of military projects and operations to track his or her progress. During debate in the Senate on the matter, while Akaka got up to speak, Leed’s colleagues poked fun at her. In behavior that was, at least back then, unbecoming of the chamber, they circled their hands around their heads, forming crowns. They called Leed the Queen of Corrosion. It was captured on C-SPAN.

  Word spread. Appropriations committees got on board, as did Senators Thad Cochran (Mississippi) and Daniel Inouye (Hawaii), and Representatives Betty Sutton (Ohio), Bill Shuster (Pennsylvania), and Rob Portman (Ohio). They represented the rust belt well. California perked up too.

  Inside the Pentagon, the proposal wasn’t received with such fanfare. Michael Wynne, the recently confirmed deputy undersecretary of defense for AT&L, thought that the reporting stipulations of the proposed law were overly burdensome. He and other DOD senior leaders figured the corrosion proposal was entirely the dream of the young committee staffer. They accused Leed of the cardinal sin of Senate staffing: getting in front of her rep. Leed recalls that Wynne was “really pissed” to the point of hostility. He arranged to meet Akaka. When Akaka—the opposite in temperament—couldn’t make it, Wynne met with Leed instead. She bore the brunt of his fury. “He said, ‘I’m running two-hundred-million-dollar programs here, and I don’t have time for this crap,’ ” she recalled. She wondered, “Who doesn’t have time to save millions of dollars?” Between Leed and Wynne, Dunmire—who had been busy writing briefing reports for testifying officials—brokered a settlement.

  Dunmire spent that summer and fall navigating the terrain between the Armed Services Committee and the undersecretary, reviewing draft statute language that was feasible to both. Way down on page 200 of Congress’s annual defense authorization bill—a hefty three-hundred-pager loaded with post-9/11 amendments—that language appeared. It stipulated the designation of a senior official responsible for the prevention and mitigation of corrosion of military equipment and infrastructure.

  The House and Senate agreed on a conference report on the bill in November, and sent it to President Bush’s desk two days before Thanksgiving. Bush signed it a week later. The Bob Stump National Defense Authorization Act didn’t appropriate an office or any funding for this new corrosion executive, and it further annoyed Wynne by giving him ninety days to pick someone.

  Dunmire certainly didn’t want the position. Though he figured it could lead to phenomenal changes, he pitied the chosen occupier of the new chair. He felt sorry for the sonofabitch who got the job, thinking the task close to impossible. He could imagine so many people not suited for it, and with Ric Sylvester, a longtime senior executive in the AT&L office, used to laugh his ass off thinking about how hard the job would be. He never imagined he’d be a part of it.

  Figuring he could perform the duties of the undersecretary and the corrosion executive, Wynne picked himself for the job. To manage the program, he decided to name a task-force director. At the Pentagon, he called in his staff. He dismissed everyone but Dunmire.

  Dunmire struggled through his first year as the sole staff member of the new corrosion “office,” which kept moving around northern Virginia: from the Pentagon, to Alexandria, to the Pentagon, to Crystal City, to the Pentagon, and back to Crystal City. With no budget, not even a phone, all he could do was develop a strategic plan, a battle strategy. Dunmire was not and is not an engineer. At Kent State University, he studied communications, and at the University of Alabama, he got a master’s in public administration. (He’s currently earning a doctorate in public administration from Virginia Tech.) So he turned to trained engineers for help. His eventual chief technical engineer, Dick Kinzie, had thrice audited corrosion costs in the air force, and figured the cost of military corrosion was around $9 billion. In 2003 Wynne directed a few hundred thousand dollars toward Dunmire’s endeavor, and Dunmire used it to hire part-time help. Finally, in 2005, Dunmire got a budget, albeit not from Congress. Mr. Wynne allocated $27 million to Dunmire, and he used part of it to detail the actual costs of corrosion. He funded studies that broke up the research into chunks. Dunmire recalls that Robert Mason, the assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for maintenance policy, programs, and resources, didn’t think such an assessment was possible, or that the resulting numbers would be meaningful, but it was, and they were, with a methodical process. After Mason died, a DOD award in maintenance excellence was named after him; Dunmire often looks at the sky and says, “Hey Bob, I did it.” (Of course, the military considers corrosion in the broadest possible sense, as the degradation of any materials—not just metal—on account of ultraviolet light, mold, mildew, or decay.) LMI, the contractor that did the analysis, ran the numbers from the top down and from the bottom up, checking that they converged.

  In 2006 Dunmire’s office declared that corrosion was responsible for $2 billion worth of annual damage to the 446,000 ground vehicles belonging to the army, and $2.4 billion in annual damage to the 256 ships belonging to the navy. The next year, Dunmire’s office declared that corrosion was responsible for two-thirds of a billion dollars annually in damage to ground vehicles belonging to the marine corps; $1.6 billion annually in damage to 4,000-odd aircraft and missiles belonging to the army; and $1.8 billion annually in damage to facilities and infrastructure belonging to the Department of Defense. The year after that, Dunmire’s office declared that corrosion was responsible for $2.6 billion in annual damage to the 2,500 aircraft belonging to the navy and the 1,200 aircraft belonging to the marine corps, and a third of a billion dollars in ye
arly damages to aircraft and ships belonging to the coast guard. Finally, his office declared that corrosion incurred $3.6 billion in damage every year to the aircraft and missiles belonging to the air force. The total was $15 billion: almost exactly in the middle of the two previous estimates.

  Engineers in Dunmire’s office cite competing incentives as a cause of much of their rust troubles. Program managers in charge of new weapons systems get graded on performance, schedule, and cost. If one oversees the building of a $500 million missile that can fly to Mars by 2015, he’s evaluated on the millions spent, the missile, and the date of completion. If the missile rusts to hell in 2016, that’s not his problem. Captains or colonels, meanwhile, want stars on their shoulders, and get them by staying on schedule and on budget. To save money, they use cheap fasteners. They use cheap paints, scoffing at new expensive blends that come with vague, optimistic guarantees. “By the time the maintenance bill comes through,” they figure, “I’ll be gone.” It’s not hard to race rust and win. Officers get their stars, and assets get treated like orphans.

  Congress tried to fix that, too. In 2009 it established corrosion executives in each of the military departments.

  After LMI repeated the round of studies, in 2011, Dunmire’s office pegged the direct costs of corrosion to the military at $21 billion. Rust, it said, accounted for a fifth to a quarter of the military’s maintenance costs. On 162 types of army aircraft, 102 types of navy aircraft, 56 types of air force aircraft, and 31 types of marine corps aircraft, that was a lot of maintenance. They ranked their assets. Corrosionwise, C-5s and C-130s were the worst planes. C-21s were the best. UH-1H helicopters were the worst. UH-60Ls were the best. On marine corps vehicles, corrosion was wrecking alternators, starters, hydraulic lines, underbodies. (About the only thing it wasn’t doing was causing parked vehicles to catch fire.) Most of the air force’s fleet was aging; bombers were thirty-five years old, tankers were forty-five years old, and as a whole, the average age of the fleet was twenty-five years.

  Corrosion interfered with the availability of military assets, too. The Corrosion Prevention Office determined that because of corrosion, each aircraft belonging to the air force was “not mission capable” sixteen days a year. Each aircraft belonging to the army was out seventeen days a year. Each aircraft belonging to the navy and the marine corps was out twenty-seven days a year. Even in Tucson, aircraft rusted (thanks to morning dew). Then there were the freak events: rusted electrical contacts on F-16s that inadvertently shut fuel valves and led to at least one crash; rusted landing gear that mired F-18s landing on aircraft carriers; a rusty bolt that was blamed in the failure of the rotor system in a Huey that crashed and killed an army captain; a rusted electrical box that was blamed in the electrocution death of a sailor. As a result, the air force computed the cost per aircraft, and the cost per pound of each aircraft. On ships—all ships—the problem was tanks: ballast tanks, fuel tanks. Emptying, cleaning, inspecting, preparing, and painting them was frightfully laborious. Plenty of sailors have gone brain dead and/or deaf chipping and painting, chipping and painting, endlessly, across oceans. But their efforts have proven no match for what Steve Spadafora, the navy’s sharp, goateed corrosion executive, referred to as “the giant electrochemical cell we call an aircraft carrier.” Dunmire regularly calls the problem “humongous,” and no admiral would disagree. Studying the cost of corrosion was just his warning shot.

  In the studio, Dunmire asked Burton to take two. “It popped or something,” he said. “Something went wrong. Could you do it again?” Burton, reading from page 3, said, “All that iron and steel must be constantly protected from rust.”

  A few takes later, just as Burton was about to start, the audio guy raised his hand. A truck had pulled up outside the studio and left its engine grumbling. Everybody could hear it. Lord said it was the FedEx truck, and waited. Burton took a seat. One of the PAs ran outside and came back reporting that it was the water guy. Cook said, “Tell him to hurry up.” Lord, in the meantime, decided to keep rolling.

  Burton soon announced, “Let’s face it, rust happens everywhere, and it affects everyone. Most of us don’t even pay attention to it until something goes wrong. And when it does go wrong, the consequences can be disastrous. Here’s what happens when corrosion results in a worst-case scenario. In 1967 the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River between Ohio and West Virginia collapsed. Forty-six people were killed. A single corrosion-induced crack only a tenth of an inch deep was the cause. The Defense Department may be leading the fight against corrosion, but the crusade extends to the entire country.”

  “Okay, great,” Lord said. “Let’s do that again.”

  Dunmire said, “You added the word even. Nice add, LeVar.”

  Burton did another take. “Congress chose the Department of Defense to lead our war on corruption—” He stopped and walked offstage. He meant corrosion, not corruption—though either was a formidable enemy. Lord said, “I hate when that happens.”

  As Burton resumed, the truck rumbled to life and pulled out of the driveway, beeping as it backed up. Burton stopped and looked down. Dunmire removed his headphones. The audio guy raised a hand and held the other to his right ear. He held the position for a few minutes. Everyone stood by. Then a plane flew overhead, and the standing by continued. Eventually Burton resumed.

  “Modern history is littered with corrosion disasters,” he said. Lord said, “Great, that’s it.” Yet the gravitas of the disasters failed to capture anyone in the room. It wasn’t great at all. Burton’s tale—as convincing as any story about rust could be—was just another sales pitch, like any of the infomercials produced in the studio.

  If the script sounded like a blend of evening news, Entertainment Tonight, and National Geographic, it’s because Darryl Rehr, its author, worked at all three. He’s covered Rodney King and O. J. Simpson, tornadoes and train crashes, gas explosions and gamma ray bursts.

  Summoning more concern, Burton said, “The annual cost of corrosion to the United States amounts to three-point-one percent of our gross domestic product. In the year 2011, that came to something like four hundred and eighty billion dollars a year—more than fifteen hundred dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country, over six thousand dollars for a family of four! Ouch.” He put a lot of emphasis on the word ouch. Dunmire liked it, and echoed, “Ouch.”

  As someone blotted the sweat from Burton’s face, the actor told Dunmire that the script was scintillating. Dunmire laughed, and then Burton laughed as he repeated the word scintillating. At the top of page 8, Burton began explaining the 2002 law that created Dunmire’s office. “Congress . . . added a section to the United States Code . . . and the new section . . . starts with this simple phrase: ‘There is an office of corrosion policy and oversight.’ ” Burton gave it as much dramatic emphasis as one could grant a legislative act and then added, in an aside, “words that reverberated around the world.” He looked at Dunmire, and they both laughed. He read it again, and after Lord said, “Cut,” Burton looked at Dunmire and said, “simple, yet powerful !” Burton was poking fun at Dunmire and the script, and Dunmire didn’t care.

  From the same page, Burton practiced the next section, reading out loud as he explained the new federal code: “The corrosion program would be designed to take what was called an overarching and integrated approach to a problem that everyone was used to dealing with on their own. From now on, things would be different.” He said this last part with emphasis and then added, “From now on, there’s a new muthafuckin’ sheriff in town.”

  Then he did the real take, omitting the “muthafuckin’ sheriff.”

  Afterward, Burton asked, “Is this a two-act play?”

  Lord said, “It’s a five-act play.”

  Cook corrected him: “Six acts.”

  They’d just finished act one. More than two-thirds of the script remained.

  Burton said, “Who writes six acts? Ugh.”

  Since Dunmire began officially fighting rust
, he’s had one agenda for one ultimate purpose: he wants the military to evolve from its current find-and-fix reaction to a form of proactive management, to the benefit of the American warrior. That’s his prime directive. (It’s the same agenda that Francis LaQue, a founding father of corrosion studies, pushed a generation ago, when he worked as Richard Nixon’s deputy assistant secretary of commerce for product standards.) Unlike many engineers, Dunmire recognized that a new approach to corrosion represented a cultural rather than a technical shift. He saw combatting corrosion as a societal concern. The first time I met Dunmire, at a navy corrosion conference in Norfolk, Virginia, called Mega Rust, he told me about wanting to change American military and civil culture. This was in 2009. “Manufacturers want stuff to break,” he said. “They design stuff to break. At the navy, we don’t want stuff to break. So we’re looking at corrosion from two different lenses.”

  He went on: “This is the USA. We’re a capitalist society. We cannot afford for the DOD to be a profit center in the business of corrosion. We have to break this cycle.” He said, “I’ll pay for it, but I don’t wanna pay for it over and over and over again. Gimme the good stuff the first time. Make sure it works, and make sure it lasts.” He told me about developing a national anticorrosion culture, focusing on prevention, and training more engineers and scientists. Hence his love affair with STEM programs. He wants to get kids turned on to corrosion, or at least engineering. “It’s insidious and pervasive, but not inevitable. It can be predicted, prevented, detected, treated,” he said. Saving 30 percent wasn’t good enough. “We gotta go from find and fix to predict and manage. Otherwise it’s twenty billion dollars, and that makes me upset.”