Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  His feelings seem to have rubbed off on a few admirals. Vice Admiral Kevin McCoy, the revered commander of Naval Sea Systems Command and also a mechanical engineer who trained at MIT, said in his keynote speech at Mega Rust that he thought corrosion would destroy the US Navy. Congress had recently approved expanding the fleet to 313 ships, but McCoy saw that aim as unfeasible. “It’s great to buy new ships,” he said, “but we can’t buy our way to three thirteen. We gotta keep three-quarters of that with our old ships.” His great fear was that corrosion would bring the US Navy’s fleet down to 200 ships, and his assessment of where the navy stood was not good: “We are completely blind right now.” Rear Admiral Thomas Moore, the deputy director of fleet readiness, agreed with him. Rear Admiral James McManamon, the deputy commander for surface warfare, said, “I wanna be able to decide when to decommission a ship, not have the ship decide.” Rear Admiral John Orzalli, the commander of US Fleet Forces, said, “If we just keep doing more today of what we’ve been doing, we just don’t have the funds. Just doing it the way we’ve always done it won’t work.” Asked how sailors could be taught about corrosion, he said, “We need to be developing a questioning attitude.” That was provocative stuff for a military that prides itself on a rigid, top-down command structure, with everyone bent at one knee. Dunmire’s campaign was taking hold.

  Dunmire, admittedly headstrong and opinionated, admires bold leaders with lofty ambitions, regardless of their political foundations—men such as Admiral Hyman Rickover, who developed nuclear-powered submarines, and Wernher von Braun, the Nazi turned NASA aerospace engineer who fathered rocket science. He admires underdogs, like Confederate commander John Singleton Mosby and Union brigadier general Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Generals George Patton and Erwin Rommel both make his list. In his war against rust, Dunmire has pushed up against the boundaries of acceptable behavior. All the while, he’s remained patient, aware that “fighting the second law of thermodynamics,” as he regularly puts it, requires resiliency. Perhaps his quirks have helped him remain steadfast where others would have given up. He says things like, “It’s fun taking on God”—then clarifies that he meant it as a joke. Another time, in the same vein, he once said, “In the new New Testament, we’re gonna talk about corrosion. To God, I’ll say: you win, but we need a little comic relief.”

  Or he’ll say, “We will continue to fight the good fight.” The good fight, as he sees it, is getting corrosion into the minds of everyone in the military: from high-level decision makers, including the secretary of defense, to first-class servicemen and the officers and bureaucrats in between. But it’s a tough campaign. Dunmire knows that adopting his agenda won’t be easy, but he has said that it’s an easier fight than gun control or terrorism. He tells people not to look at fighting corrosion as a negative thing but as an opportunity to make materials last longer. “We’re planting seeds,” he said. “In my life, I don’t know if it’ll succeed.” He always insists that he’s not done, that his program is growing as incrementally as rust.

  Actually, it’s dealing with human beings that require even more patience than dealing with aircraft and ships and bases. Physics he calls black and white. People he calls “quasi scientific at best.” They have more momentum than a carrier and require as much space for making turns. Figuring that psychological battles must be fought in person, Dunmire has traveled a lot in order to, as he says, connect the dots. Since 2005, his work has taken him to Guam, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Germany, England, Italy, Alaska, Hawaii, Texas, Nevada, and Florida. At Hilton hotels, he was a diamond member. At the hotel near Kissimmee, both bartenders knew Dunmire’s name and poured him scotch on the rocks without asking what he wanted. Over the last five years, he’s spent at least one of every four weeks away from the five-sided windowless vault known as the Pentagon. He regularly visits Carderock, Patuxent, Norfolk, Aberdeen, Quantico, Fort Belvoir, and Andrews Air Force Base.

  With officials and officers at such places, he’s not afraid to tell them they screwed up. He tries to be tactful but firm. “Make your point and get out,” he says. “But if someone disagrees, you know what you say? You say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ” The rest of the time, he’s on the phone with people at such places. “You can’t manage this program from a desk,” he’s said. Thrice annually, his office holds a corrosion conference, naming them like Super Bowls. For Corrosion XXXI, a month after LeVar 5, he hoped to catch up with dozens of players in the rust world. The government did not like the sound of that.

  In October 2010 the General Services Administration—the government’s secretarial arm—sent more than three hundred people to its four-day Western Regions conference in Las Vegas. Attendees stayed at a four-star resort, ate $44 breakfasts and $95 dinners, and enjoyed the services of a clown and a mind reader. The total came to 8 million government dimes. When the largesse was discovered and publicized in April 2012, the department chief and deputy were forced out, and GSA’s administrator resigned. Then the Office of Management and Budget tightened the rules governing conferences and symposia. Half a year before Corrosion XXXI, any meeting between more than two people was henceforth defined as a conference, and conferences became no-no’s.

  Determined to talk about rust woes face-to-face, Dunmire renamed his corrosion conference. It became Corrosion Forum XXXI. Two dozen people came, fewer than expected, prompting Dunmire to call it a forum-minus. There Dunmire announced that in 2014 he would hold a praxis. Since there was no registration and no fee, DOD wouldn’t consider it a conference. In any case, whatever it was, it was as bare bones as could be, in a bland room on the third floor of a building in a Beltway office park. There were no clowns or mind readers or catered meals, only chairs and endless PowerPoint presentations and cafeteria trays.

  At the gathering defined by creative hairsplitting, Dunmire was irked that all of government was punished for the mistakes of a few. To those who’d made it, he said, while rocking on his feet, “You gotta do this face-to-face, rather than videoconferences, counter to federal policy. I’m guarding jealously the ability to meet. We’re meeting with general counsel and WHS [Washington Headquarters Services] to make sure we can continue to meet. It’s not that we wanna get out of our office, it’s that we can’t do our job from the office. So thank you.”

  The second act was to begin, with Burton grasping a chunk of iron as he roughly explained the principle of entropy. Holding the twenty-five-pound rusty prop, Lord said, “Where is this rock gonna come from? Out of his ass?” Burton laughed loudly. Lord said, “Can it sit on a stool? Not that kind of stool!” Then he told the story of Shaquille “Shaq” O’Neal, who, in the studio the day before, had taken a photo of his egesta and showed it to everyone.

  Poop references were fresh. Dunmire, in fact, had just told me that a few weeks ago, at an accelerated corrosion facility in Nevada, he dropped his cell phone in a toilet. Since it was government property, he returned it to the Pentagon. A guy there put it in a bag labeled “Dunmire. Toilet.” Dunmire is not above poop jokes. Referring to the Facilities and Infrastructure Corrosion Evaluation Study (FICES), he calls it feces. “Based on the findings of the feces study,” he told attendees at Corrosion Forum XXXI, “you’ll have a lot to chew on.” Similarly, the navy’s Shipboard Corrosion Assessment Training course is supposed to be called and pronounced S-CAT, not SCAT. Dunmire takes humor where he can find it. In the early days of the corrosion office, when it was just him and two sidekicks, he called the bunch the three rusketeers. He’s since tried a few corrosion jokes and confirms that not one is funny. At NACE’s 2012 annual corrosion conference, he told me, “My jokes never go over; I have to say, ‘I just told a joke.’ ”

  Just then, another truck showed up, grumbling—and everyone took five. It turned out this truck was full of cases of crème brûlée—a pallet’s worth, because Nicholson also runs a food business. So half the crew, including Lord, in his socks, began unloading the truck and stacking the boxes in the shade.

  Burton pas
sed on the manual labor. He stepped out of the lights, took a seat in the director’s chair, crossed his legs, and rolled his second cigarette of the morning, from a pouch of Bugler Turkish tobacco. When he finished, he went outside to smoke in the shade of the trailer. There I asked him how Dunmire persuaded him to do these corrosion videos. “It didn’t take a lot of convincing, once I knew he wasn’t a stalker,” Burton said. Then he added, “The military-industrial complex is obsessed with Star Trek.”

  In his first years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, when Frank Carlucci was the boss and Dunmire was just a GS-9, Dunmire attended his first Star Trek convention. He went dressed as a civilian, brought his wife, and met James Doohan, who’d played Scotty, the engineer in the original series. In the summer of 2006, a few rungs up the Civil Service pay scale, Dunmire decided it was time for another. To the big one, the fortieth-anniversary Star Trek convention, he headed. Fifteen thousand Trekkies poured into Las Vegas and immersed themselves in science fiction for four days. Dunmire’s wife stayed home, but Dunmire (dressed as Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation) brought his fourteen-year-old son (dressed as the same). They stayed at the Stratosphere hotel. The convention was a mile south, at the Las Vegas Hilton. Twice a day, this Pentagon official with top-secret clearance—whose boss’s boss reports to the president—walked down Paradise Road with the emblem of the United Federation of Planets’ Starfleet Command on his chest.

  At the convention, Dunmire sat stage left, halfway down. Beside him was a guy who’d biked there from California, brought no other clothes, costume or otherwise, and smelled like it. On the second day, while Worf was onstage, a woman (dressed as Dr. Beverly Crusher) sitting just past the stinky biker guy turned toward Dunmire and told him to shut up. Dunmire had been talking for two days straight about you know what. Recalled the woman: “I was, like, ‘Dude, you’re obsessed with the Kyrosians, they were only in two episodes, and I’m trying to watch Worf!’ ” Dunmire said to her, “No, not Kyrosian—corrosion. I’m telling you what I do!” They began talking about Dunmire’s job, his war on rust. The woman—Stacey Cook—revealed that she was a video producer. Dunmire mentioned his intent to make corrosion-related videos. Cook reached into the tricorder that was slung around her shoulder. Beside a medical scanner, she had a stack of business cards. She and Dunmire exchanged cards. Dunmire called within a month.

  During the next year, Cook produced a few short video podcasts for Dunmire’s office. Dunmire, as the head of the office, was the talent. He dived into the role like it was his first day on a ship. In one video, he pops up on screen, wincing quizzically, as if giving the camera a hard time. He dances, sort of. In another, five versions of Dunmire, all dressed differently, are sitting in a room, watching a sixth Dunmire talk about corrosion on a screen. In another, he picks up a globe while pondering, in the manner of Orson Welles, “How am I going to get this message across?” The scene dissolves in a dream sequence to open-mike night at the Pentagon, where Dunmire is a stand-up comedian. He’s got a lit cigar and a cue card, and he’s talking about Congress’s corrosion mandate. Describing these podcasts, Dunmire said, “We’re trying to be humorous!” He added, “It’s self-deprecating humor, but it keeps people watching.” They’re also tax dollars, uniquely spent.

  Still, Dunmire wanted to go bigger. He wanted to make a video to succeed the classic but outdated (and boring) 1954 educational film Corrosion in Action, which features crude and inaccurate animation of a corrosion cell. Dunmire was unwilling to pay LaQue $50,000 for the rights to it; he could paint part of a plane for that price. The video idea idled until Dunmire and Cook returned to Vegas for the 2007 Star Trek Convention. Dunmire went in the original series gold shirt as Captain James T. Kirk; Cook went as Nurse Christine Chapel. Her regular employer, Lorri Nicholson, came along for the ride even though she thought both were big geeks. She was right: Dunmire knows and regularly says the middle name of Captain James T. Kirk. In Vegas, Dunmire heard LeVar Burton say that he was looking for work, and that’s when it clicked. Having hosted Reading Rainbow, Burton had the educational credibility and prominence that Dunmire was looking for. Nicholson and Cook, who had filmed a TV production for Disney and NASA with LeVar Burton, said, Well, we know LeVar. Two months later, Dunmire sent a letter to Burton via his agent. Four months after that, the night before production began on LeVar 1, Dunmire and Burton finally met in Florida. After a few drinks, Dunmire followed LeVar Burton into the men’s room. Hence Burton’s stalker joke.

  The way Dunmire sees it, Star Trek is a morality play as good as anything that Shakespeare or the Greeks wrote, but the appeal to a longtime military man is obvious. It’s a leadership fantasy. The Starship Enterprise is out there on its own, fighting challenges improvisationally, unencumbered by bureaucracy or sluggish agencies. When the captain decides action is called for, action is what he gets. He doesn’t wait for appropriations, or write policy reports, or dance around political correctness. Dunmire’s favorite episode, a two-parter from the fifth incarnation of the Star Trek series called “A Mirror, Darkly,” is revealing. It covers a hot-headed, overambitious mutineer who conjures up a wild scheme to save the empire that others have failed to protect. In the episode’s climactic moment, the new commander says, “I’ve been a soldier all my life, and I will not stand by and let these people destroy an empire that has endured for centuries!” He gets down on one knee and continues: “I ask you, all of you—join me.”

  “My job is to make boring things fun,” Dunmire once told me. “Corrosion’s not a sexy topic.” About the second half he was right, but whether or not Star Trek has sex appeal beyond the military is an open question. One can only contemplate a body in a Starfleet uniform for so long. “You pull ’em in,” he said. “You gotta pull ’em in. When we’re finished, it’ll be nifty.” In the words of Greg Riddick, Dunmire’s consigliere: “They recognize that guy. They’re gonna sit up and watch it.” Stacey Cook justified the LeVar Burton approach more squarely. “His delivery is what we want,” she said. “It’s what appeals to people. It’s like, wow, someone talking about technical corrosion, and not just schooling them. It’s an extremely soft sell.” Indeed, when Burton narrates, he sounds fascinated without sounding erudite, engaged but not obsessed.

  Beside the trailer in Florida, I asked Burton, “What do you tell your friends in LA?”

  “I don’t tell them,” he said. “No, I say I’m doing some work with the Department of Defense. Then, when their eyes glaze over, I move on.” Woe to West Coast wonks. After a pause, he added, “There was only supposed to be one video.” Earlier, while a PA was cleaning a smudge off of a Plexiglas screen, before Burton had even begun shooting the fifth corrosion video, Dunmire asked him to do number six. The conversation went like this:

  DUNMIRE: “You know about LeVar Six?”

  BURTON: “Six?”

  DUNMIRE: “Cook bring it up to you?”

  BURTON: “I’m retiring.”

  DUNMIRE: “Yeah, six.”

  BURTON: “Five, I’m out.”

  DUNMIRE: “Yeah, six.”

  BURTON: “Okay, six. That has a nice ring to it. And I’m out.”

  DUNMIRE: “Yeah, six!”

  BURTON: “I’m game. So this really is paying off, Dan?”

  DUNMIRE: “Yeah.”

  BURTON: “That’s great. It really is.”

  DUNMIRE: “I’m excited.”

  BURTON: “As am I.”

  After thinking about it for a few minutes, Burton said, “This is part of my legacy, Dan.”

  I asked Burton, “Do you do other work like this?” He responded immediately: “There’s nothing like working with Dan.”

  Dunmire has a reputation for being crazy, scattered, and bumbling. He doesn’t know his office phone number or address. He wears loud outfits—Penguins shirts, Pirates shirts, a Steelers turtleneck, a Steelers sweater, Pittsburgh-themed ties, layered articles that many would wear only ironically. His Department of Defense ID hangs
on a Steelers lanyard. He used to drive a Chrysler PT Cruiser painted like a giant Steelers football helmet. He calls himself a buffoon. People invariably call him a character. In social situations, he lingers a bit too long, awkwardly, as if unaware. Talking to three staff, including the director, of a museum in Orlando, he stood in a hallway with one leg forward, his torso angled and canted forward, both arms out, one finger pointed, the other fist clenched. He held his head sideways, with his evocative eyebrows cocked, his forehead the closest thing to those around him, the pupils of his beady eyes peeking out from above nonexistent glasses. It’s a worrisome, piercing posture with a hint of the lunacy you see in the homeless or deranged. Had he been playing charades, I’d have guessed that he was conducting an orchestra, or doing a hippie dance in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The museum staff, meanwhile, beheld Dunmire with feet planted firmly, steadily, hands clasped or in pockets, their upper bodies immobile. Only their necks moved slightly, as did their facial features. An hour later, when he bumped into a visitor dressed up as Captain Kirk (it was, after all, Halloween), Dunmire stood up straight, gathered himself into a proper posture, and told him, “Good work.” He addressed the costumed man as “sir.” Shortly thereafter, he joked that maybe he ate too much lead paint as a kid.

  When he speaks, Dunmire’s voice is hoarse and scratchy. His words, laden with Pentagon jargon like “DepSecDef” (Deputy Secretary of Defense), come out fast and slurred, always with emphasis. That’s the other thing people invariably cite in Dunmire: passion. Talking to him is sometimes like getting berated by a coach—he’s always fired up. He’s often so excited that what he says is rambling and discursive to the point of annoyance, such that more than once while taking notes I wrote, “Dan is a terrible storyteller.” If you have an agenda, it’s frustrating. If you want specifics—like, say, the cost of producing a LeVar video—he’ll make you bang your head on the wall. If you just want a story, he’ll get your attention. He’s a whiz at improvising. At Corrosion Forum XXXI, in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation clogged with numbers, acronyms, and procedures, Dunmire interrupted, took the microphone, pointed to the screen, and said, “Why do I need any charts? I can just talk about this stuff,” and winged it with a story. Leaning on the podium, he scratched his head, looked down at the floor or up at nothing in particular, and stole the show. Nobody could accuse him of lacking dedication or commitment.