Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  Aside from all things Pittsburgh and Star Trek, he’s got one more obsession: he doesn’t like goats. Examining corrosion on radio antennas in Kauai, Hawaii, once, he learned that invasive goats were eating vegetation so quickly and thoroughly that it was leading to rapid erosion. The foundations of government structures were threatened. “We gotta stop these goats!” Dunmire said. “We gotta kill ’em!” One colleague got him a Navy shirt that says, “fear the goat.” Others regularly write proposals for getting rid of goats. Mention the word goat and Dunmire will lock eyes, tilt his head forward, and give you that intense look.

  Back inside, Burton held the chunk of iron while saying, “When we first dig it up it looks like this: a lump of iron ore.” The chunk was smaller and less cumbersome than before, thanks to Kinzie, Dunmire’s chief technical engineer, who broke it in half. Four decades of corrosion work, a handful of patents, a degree in chemical engineering—and this is how he helped. Otherwise Kinzie sat quietly in the corner, waiting for technical issues to arise. One could be forgiven for getting the impression that what turns Dunmire on is what turns the rest of his team off. He’s the social animal, and the rest are the technical guys. They’re also his safety net.

  When Michael Wynne picked Dunmire to run the corrosion office, he knew what he was doing. He wanted a program manager, a facilitator. He recognized that a geek like Data would make a terrible captain. Wynne wanted someone who could wrangle engineers. But engineers didn’t see the wisdom at first. Rich Hays, now Dunmire’s deputy, ran the corrosion lab at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Carderock, Maryland. From Virginia Tech, Hays had undergrad and master’s degrees in materials engineering, and he had worked on corrosion-caused cracks in submarine propellers and on corrosion in expeditionary fighting vehicles (EFVs) belonging to the marine corps. His first impression of Dunmire was “Who is this joker?” While Dunmire presented, he laughed openly. He thought the man unqualified.

  Hays—tall, skinny, and bespectacled—is precise, direct, linear, and serious. He recalled, “I was still in my mind-set of solving corrosion as a technical issue. I am converted to a large degree. The reason I’m here is to learn how the hell he did it when I couldn’t.” He said, “We were gonna invent the next best thing. Some technology. Some new coating. We learned quickly that’s not the way to go.” Now, of Dunmire, he said, “Dan is a visionary. He’s the opposite of me.” He added, “Dan’s really good at starting stuff. I’m here to institutionalize it, get it done. If the office goes away, it’ll be like we were never here. So that’s why I’m excited about policies.” In other words, he’s part of a team that keeps Dunmire in line and on track. He resisted Dunmire for years and finally yielded. Now he jokes about planting a GPS tracker on his boss.

  Hays wasn’t the first to join Dunmire’s team—he wasn’t one of the rusketeers. The first was Larry Lee, a quiet, diligent, polite air force colonel (now retired) born in the Philippines. After studying chemical engineering and joining the air force in 1977, he spent twenty years keeping aircraft flying. Inspecting and designing fighter jet engines, he rose from an enlisted airman basic to colonel. In the summer of 2001, he landed at the Pentagon, in the Office of Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, near Dunmire. A year and a half later, Dunmire brought on Lee as his deputy director. Seven years later, when Dunmire finally swayed Hays, Lee became Dunmire’s chief of staff.

  Dick Kinzie, of rock-breaking skill, was also there from the beginning, as Dunmire’s second hire. He had four decades of corrosion work, half of that as a materials engineer in the air force’s Corrosion Prevention and Control Office. He worked on the design of new aircraft, the upkeep of old aircraft, and assessing the cost of corrosion. By the time Dunmire hired him, he had risen to deputy office chief and retired. Unlike most, he knew his corrosion counterparts in the army, navy, coast guard, and NASA, which made Dunmire’s life easier. In the early years of the Corrosion Prevention Office, for all who had the same impression that Hays did, there was Kinzie, allaying their fears with his gentle southern warmth and calmness. He too had his doubts about Dunmire’s chances of success. He’s become Dunmire’s insurance policy. Chief technical engineer he remains.

  The men who comprise Dunmire’s core team are nothing like him. Each is an opposite: quiet, linear, calm, composed, less obsessed, closer to “normal,” technically proficient. When Dunmire stumbles over tiny details—whether an acronym is C&O or O&C, whether lines on a chart point in the right direction—and digs a hole for himself, his sidekicks correct him. They reassure others that the agenda, the program, is not being winged on the fly, that it has bounds, that it can work in this galaxy at this star date. Dunmire won’t take notes or follow a schedule, but they will. Dunmire will banter, and they’ll wait. As Larry Lee put it, he and Hays will be in the kitchen, Kinzie will be in the garage, and Dunmire will be, well, roaming around somewhere outside. Yet they get along. In ten years, not one has quit. Nor has anyone been fired. “My team is not bullshit,” Dunmire told me once. “I may be bullshit, but my team isn’t.” He has called them geniuses. Often they wear matching CPO shirts, in orange, khaki, or blue, but it’s obvious which one contains Dunmire. At Corrosion Forum XXXI, attendees called Dunmire eccentric, unconventional, and non-Pentagony, but they also called him charismatic, guileless, spellbinding, effective, and great. One person put it succinctly: “All of us worked in corrosion forever, and we never got anywhere. Then Dan came along. He’s funny, he’s got energy. He’s colorful.”

  It sounded like a dive bomber, but it was just a prop plane flying overhead. Burton, working from the top of page 11, stopped reading while everyone waited for the audio guy to give the all clear.

  Dunmire said, “Hold on. This won’t fly. What the DOD did was create a culture change. We can’t say needed a culture change. That won’t pass security review.” He explained this to Cook—“Not a culture of change, a culture change”—and to the teleprompter editor, and to Burton, who laughed. Burton repeated what Dunmire said, skeptical of Dunmire’s insistence on minutiae. It seemed that Burton had begun to tire of the DOD manner, to suspect that Washington was hopelessly bureaucratic and gargantuan and nitpicky. Dunmire found another issue. He said, “Technically, under secretary is two words, capitalized.” Then, to nobody in particular, he said, “I’m the chosen one.” Burton didn’t respond to the second comment. He just said, “I’ll make it two words in my mind.” What he meant was: Who the fuck cares?

  Burton, though, believes in Dunmire’s program, which is why he’s continued to shoot the rust videos, and why he bills Dunmire at a reduced rate. It’s also why, at Dunmire’s 2011 corrosion conference in Palm Springs, California, he praised Dunmire in a keynote speech, comparing him in spirit and authenticity to the greatest men he had known: Alex Haley, Gene Roddenberry, and Fred Rogers. Haley wrote Roots, the 1977 miniseries that starred Burton; Roddenberry was the creator of Star Trek; and Rogers created a much-loved PBS children’s program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Burton called Dunmire’s commitment to the greater good genuine, honest, and boundless. He called him a force of nature. Burton also admitted he’d become a rust evangelist because of Dunmire.

  Assured that the script was now correct, Burton resumed his dramatic reading. “All they needed now,” he said, “was a plan.” Dunmire raised both hands, flexed, and said, “Oh, yeah. I love the way you say that.”

  Dunmire comes from a long line of headstrong military men. His tenth-or-so-generation great-grandfather, a German farmer named Johann George Dormeyer, settled in Allegheny County and fought in the Revolutionary War. His five sons all worked the five-hundred-acre family farm in Elderton, northeast of Pittsburgh. In 1810 a census official changed the family name to Dunmire. For seven generations since then, every Dunmire but one, a cabinetmaker, was a farmer, and when circumstances required, a soldier. One Dunmire or another fought in the Civil War, World War I, World War II. None died in battle. None earned a college degree. Dunmire’s great-grandfather Samson Dunmire died after getti
ng kicked by a cow. Samson’s son sold the family farm a decade before Dan Dunmire was born.

  The baby in the family (Dunmire has two older sisters), Dunmire took after his father, a steelworker at U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works in Youngstown, Ohio. “Do it right the first time, be responsible, take care of business”—that was his dad’s philosophy. His dad kept inconsistent hours, came home dirty, and didn’t blame anybody for mishaps. No engineer (he didn’t finish college), he nonetheless knew corrosion.

  From the time that Dan was two years old, he knew he would join the army. He waited until he was seventeen, whereupon he signed up for the ROTC. At Kent State, he wore his uniform with pride. This, in the years following the 1970 massacre in which four students protesting the US invasion of Cambodia were gunned down by members of the Ohio National Guard. “I was very unpopular,” Dunmire recalled. “I said, ‘God bless America.’ ” Yet he was also more liberal than his father. A constitutionalist, he saw the government as serving a role in private life, particularly as it related to Pittsburgh. In 1970, at the opening game at the Pirates’ new ballpark, Three Rivers Stadium, Dunmire argued with his father about public/private partnerships. Dunmire the elder thought the stadium ought to have been funded privately. Dunmire the younger thought the government had a role in supporting the city’s culture. To this day, he thinks that Pittsburgh wouldn’t have a concert venue, PNC Park (the Pirates’ newest home), Heinz Field (where the Steelers play), or be considered a major city if not for public investment.

  In 1974 Dunmire volunteered to go to Vietnam. He was sent to Germany instead, and spent three years in the US Army’s VII Corps, first as a lieutenant, and then as a platoon leader. His task was to create denial barriers, anything to slow Soviet forces down should they decide to head west. He pretty much spent three years blowing up roads and bridges. Now, as the defender of military infrastructure, it’s almost like he’s atoning for those acts.

  Returning to the States, Dunmire landed in Tampa, and began working in food service. He spent the final years of Carter’s presidency as a shift manager at the Busch Gardens theme park, and the first year of Reagan’s presidency in a Marriott. The hotel chain sent him to Birmingham, Alabama, where, on top of work, he began earning a master’s degree in public administration. He met his wife. At a Veterans Day dinner, he also met Hyman Rickover, his longtime hero. The admiral was old and frail, and Dunmire probably shook his hand a bit too enthusiastically while thanking him for his contributions. Dunmire loved him because he was a master of bulldozing through bureaucracy, was well rounded, had a sharp team of subordinates, and—with his four stars—refused to kiss ass. For the last trait, after becoming the longest-serving man in US military history, Rickover was fired. He died four years later.

  On April Fool’s Day, in 1982, Dunmire bought an establishment on the edge of Alabama’s campus called Doogie’s Hot Dogs. He changed the name to Dan’s Breakfast and Lunch, and ran it for two years. He remembers his duties as owner and chief bottle washer. For twenty-six months, Monday through Friday, he got up hours before dawn so that he could open the place at six. Dunmire took classes at night. On weekends, he served in the reserves. He sold the restaurant when he was selected for the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Presidential Management Internship program. That’s how he first got to the Pentagon. It was 1984.

  It’s not like Dunmire had gotten rich selling hot dogs and Coke; in Washington, he and his wife rented a second-story apartment in the historic Anacostia neighborhood. After the internship in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, he spent another year there working as an analyst, looking at personnel compensation and readiness. Then Dunmire became an analyst in the AT&L office. He moved to Temple Hills, Maryland, just southeast of DC, between the Pentagon and Andrews Air Force Base. Eventually he found a foreclosed home—a bargain buy—on a half acre in Stafford, Virginia. He had three kids.

  In the mid-1990s, during the Clinton presidency, Dunmire applied for the Undersecretary’s Best Commercial Practices fellowship program, which would put him in private industry for two years. For his choices, he picked food-service companies, which were familiar and presented no conflicts of interest. He listed Heinz, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, the Reynolds Metals Company, and Anheuser-Busch as potential employers. His preference by far, though, was Heinz, in Pittsburgh. Dunmire prepared thoroughly. When interviewed, he cited profit and loss figures, quoted authors, and mentioned numbers the interviewers had never heard. The interviewers told him they’d call him in two weeks. At home, there was a message on the answering machine. It said, “Can you come two weeks early?”

  He spent the next two years in Pittsburgh and in various Heinz facilities around the country studying how the company did business, and in particular how it bought brown paper. Heinz bought $20 million of paper a year, for boxes, trays, and packaging. He went to paper school at Weyerhaeuser, outside of Chicago. For four days, at one of the country’s largest paper-products companies, he immersed himself in the minutiae of forty-pound brown paper. He learned about warp, miscuts, corrugation; he made himself knowledgeable. When Heinz closed a plant in Tracy, California, Dunmire helped integrate the extra ketchup line into a plant in Fremont, Ohio. He made sure that the boxes would run through machines. For $250,000, Dunmire said he could get the line configured and running, and in a year, he told a vice president, the company would recoup the cost. At the largest ketchup plant in the world, his plan worked, and the VP was impressed. Dunmire still calls that line his line. At the end of his internship, Heinz offered him a job as a senior purchasing agent. He was intrigued—“I could have made it in industry after all,” he said—but, by then in his forties, he figured it was too late to make such a big switch. The military was calling. Heinz, Dunmire says, made him aggressive, gave him a critical eye, and changed his perspective on business. It also made him think of work as more of an adventure than a job.

  Back at the Pentagon, Dunmire worked on Bush’s transition team. When everybody else was on vacation, Dunmire wrote a three-hundred-page report. The DOD’s general counsel noticed. When new staff were hired, and they had yet to be cleared by the FBI and confirmed by the Senate, the Pentagon had Dunmire escort them around. It is unclear whether he did this wide eyed and leaning forward. In this way, he met Michael Wynne.

  In Dunmire’s world, two major events took place in September 2001. After the first, air force colonel Al Evans, the military assistant to Undersecretary Wynne, asked Dunmire a not entirely hypothetical question. If they had to leave the Pentagon, he asked, what key acquisition documents would they need? Dunmire emailed a dozen documents to Evans thirty minutes later. That same month, NACE published its cost-of-corrosion study.

  Wynne sent Dunmire to the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, Pennsylvania’s ultrasecure “underground Pentagon.” He spent six months there. When he returned, he went back to acquisition resources and analysis, looking at chemical demilitarization, guided munitions, weapons systems. On top of the usual matters, he met with Maren Leed, from the Senate Armed Services Committee, to work out this corrosion thing on Senator Akaka’s plate. His boss was the number three man at the Pentagon, below the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense. (Protocol has it that the four undersecretaries of defense—for AT&L, policy, the budget, and personnel and readiness—follow that pecking order.) Then Congress passed a bill, Bush signed it into law, and Wynne called his staff to a meeting.

  Six years and many GAO audits later, Congress rewrote the law regarding the corrosion executive. Like Wynne, successive undersecretaries had decided that they too could fill the role. Congress wanted someone dedicated to the job. To a new director, the authorities of the old executive went. Dunmire, by then a special assistant, was the obvious pick.

  “You all ready for talent?” Cook asked. “Okay, bringing in talent.” It was hotter in the studio, and over the next two and a half hours, Burton had the sweat wiped off his forehead at least thirteen times, just about every ten minutes. Dunmire, meanwhile, grew
visibly tired. His ability to sit up straight waned. He yawned, rested an elbow on the table, rubbed his temples with the thumb and index finger of his right hand, drank a can of Coke, yawned again, stretched, groaned, rested a hand on his knee, took a deep breath and exhaled, yawned loudly, and then stretched. Shifting positions, he knocked over a coffee cup. I asked him if he planned on taking a nap. “Are you crazy?” His eyes widened. “I didn’t drive all the way from Pittsburgh to take a nap!”

  He continued making minor changes to the script so that the video would survive intact. He added the phrase “environmental severity index” to a sentence about the most corrosive environments in the country, and changed the word built to completed. He corrected 2002 to 2003, and insisted that military academies—the US Military Academy, the US Naval Academy, the US Air Force Academy—be listed in order of creation. When he questioned whether three hundred million dollars should be referred to as hundreds of millions of dollars, Cook told him he was just being picky. When he suggested that “we’ve” become “I’ve,” Cook told him not to worry about it.

  Reading from page 18, Burton explained, “Before the corrosion program started, each of the different services had its own rules for dealing with corrosion, and that usually meant wait till it corrodes, and then repair it.” Then he ran through some of the projects that Dunmire’s office has funded. He started with an example of an asset that the navy couldn’t afford to let keep corroding: Hawaii’s Red Hill pipeline, a thirty-two-inch line running three miles between twenty massive buried fuel tanks and Pearl Harbor. The pipeline was built in 1942 and kept a secret until 2005, when Dunmire decided it was time to “pig” the line. It had never been inspected internally. Burton roughly explained pigging—“a process that sends sensors down the pipe interiors to check for problems”—and then moved on. What he didn’t mention was that Dunmire threw $1 million at the project, his office’s first. Dunmire saw it as low-hanging fruit. Nor did Burton mention that the navy now owns a custom ultrasonic pig made by Vetco. Unmentioned also was that just after the inspection, a day or two before Christmas, the line sprung a leak, while crews were there to deal with it. Had they not been present, the leak could have tainted Honolulu’s water supply and inflicted $1 billion worth of damage. Because it was contained, the leak didn’t make national news. But Senator Akaka found out and later invited Dunmire to sit beside him at his office in the Hart Senate Office Building. Akaka called him Dormeyer.