Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  Since 2006, when Dunmire got his first true budget—$15 million, approved by the White House—he has spent roughly two-thirds of the money on projects: half on weapons projects and half on facilities projects. After metrics (studying the cost of corrosion), weapons and facilities projects comprise the second and third arenas on which Dunmire’s ten-person staff focuses. Red Hill pipeline notwithstanding, the facilities projects tend to get overlooked because they address the same problems everyone else has: rusty pipes, pumps, roofs, tanks, and so on. The weapons projects, for the benefit of helicopters, Patriot missiles, and aircraft carriers, are far sexier.

  A page later, Burton mentioned technical collaboration with universities and government labs, and the development of a corrosion-sensing paint at a University of Southern Mississippi laboratory. What he didn’t mention is that from 2005 to 2013, of the 236 weapons projects that Dunmire’s office has thrown $165 million at, roughly a third of them have been in pursuit of the perfect paint. The Corrosion Prevention Office has funded the development of coatings for aircraft, decks, fire systems, jet fuel tanks, water tanks, air-conditioning coils, pump impellers, vehicle underbodies, bilges, magnesium parts, and cold environments. They’re single coats or multiple coats, primers or topcoats, designed to cure quickly or at high temperatures or low temperatures, for spraying or rolling or powder coating or depositing by laser. Some are magnesium rich, or zinc rich, or vinyl based, or epoxy based, or nickel titanium based, or specifically chrome free. Some are fluorescent, stealth, sticky, thick, long-lasting, flexible, fire-resistant, chip-resistant, thermally insulating, or nonskid. The office has put more than $3 million toward paints that are self-priming, self-inspecting, self-cleaning, or self-healing. The office has also spent just under $1 million developing peel-and-stick patches for the marine corps, so that soldiers can quickly repair said coatings in the field. Dunmire calls coatings “the first line of defense” and says, “Sometimes you don’t have any other solution.”

  Many of the paints spent years beside the warm, salty water of southern Florida, where scientists at the Naval Research Lab examined their fortitude much in the way that a kid might study milk by leaving a carton in a refrigerator for months. Stuck to playing-card-sized pieces of metal, the paints endured atmospheric exposure rivaled nowhere in America but on Cape Canaveral (where many were also tested, with help from NASA). On rows and rows of racks, the painted coupons blossomed with rust, exfoliated with rust, bubbled with rust. Many faded from gray to tan or blue or even pink. The navy does not go for paints that turn pink. To those paints that the navy has gone for, the staff of the NRL composed a sort of military paean:

  The purpose of the hull is to protect the paint.

  The purpose of the reactor is to drive the paint around.

  The purpose of the SUBSAFE program is to ensure the paint comes to the surface and will not be lost.

  The purpose of the cathodic protection system is to back up the paint.

  The purpose of the weapons is to defend the paint.

  The purpose of the Special Hull Treatment is to protect the paint.

  The purpose of the Vertical Launch System is to destroy those who would do the paint harm.

  The military’s best paints used to incorporate hexavalent chromium, the carcinogenic stuff at the heart of the 2000 movie Erin Brockovich. It’s phased that out, and Dunmire’s office is now behind an analysis of alternatives: a “program management guide to hexavalent chromium.” Seeing a mockup of the guide at Corrosion Forum XXXI, Dunmire called it phenomenal. He gets excited about paint. With a good paint, properly applied, a military asset may live long and prosper.

  Since 2006, the budget suggested by the White House each year has fallen steadily. No matter the size of the presidential budget, Dunmire insists that his office is adequately funded. “We do what we can with what we have,” he said. “If you can’t take it, get out.” Like his father, Dunmire doesn’t complain. He has fans and enemies alike, but he wants his results to stand on their own.

  While the executive appropriations decreased, the number of projects his office supported slightly increased. At the same time, Dunmire’s priorities have changed. In the initial years of the office, the projects tended to be either low-hanging fruit or focused on corrosion sensing: sensors for cathodic protection systems, for finding leaks or cracks, for finding rust on ships, for detecting environmental exposure, for seeing rust in fuel and ballast tanks. Once the easy targets had been hit, the office devoted resources to bigger, less glamorous headaches: inspecting corroded guy wires on antenna towers or tackling rust at Guam’s Kilo Wharf. Lately, the office has focused on material selection and corrosion inhibitors and on technology applicable to all branches: composite bridges, concrete docks with noncorroding rebar. Much of it is basic stuff: aircraft washdown and rinse systems, dehumidifiers with long hoses, mildew-removal kits; aircraft covers and shelters. Some run tabs into the millions, but others—like laser powder deposition to repair seals on jet engines—have gone for as little as $30,000.

  All the fancy paints in the world don’t do any good if the painter doesn’t know what he’s doing, though. One could be forgiven for assuming that paint is a simple business and that minimal education is sufficient for its application—but neither is the case. At shipyards and hangars, fewer than half of the military’s painters possess high school diplomas. Many can’t add or multiply. When mixing paint, they use a ladle of this and a ladle of that, to avoid math. Assigning junior members to painting has virtually ensured poor results. Failing to mandate rigid specifications for the military’s vast painting jobs has guaranteed them. The only thing more boring than painting a navy ship is coming up with the standards by which it must be done. Toward this end—the fourth arena of Dunmire’s office—the corrosion team has devoted considerable energy, reviewing thousands of specs that govern, among other things, humidity, surface preparation, application, and thickness. Dunmire saw opportunity in the problem.

  Broader and more potent than technical specs are the policies that Dunmire’s office is trying to institute. These are Dunmire’s fifth arena of focus, and as Chief of Staff Larry Lee puts it, “where you make the big bucks.” When the Office of Corrosion Policy and Oversight was established in 2003, Dunmire and his sidekicks took only cursory looks, when lucky, at weapons under development by the military. Now all DOD programs get shuffled through the office, keeping one member of Dunmire’s staff more than busy. He looks at plans for the air force’s new KC-46 aerial refueling jets, its new F-22s and F-35s, its new long-range radar, its $6 billion Air Force Space Surveillance System, or Space Fence. He looks at the DOD’s UHF satellite communications system and the marine corps’s successor to the Humvee, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. For the navy, he looks at the new tactical jamming system and the new Air and Missile Defense Radar, new combat logistics ships, Poseidon planes, and presidential helicopters. All military weapon requests for proposals (RFPs) now stipulate corrosion prevention and control assessments. Dunmire’s office established guidelines for companies submitting new products to the military; in the twenty-first century, companies must address corrosion before proceeding. Dunmire has called this “getting corrosion policy weaved into the fabric of the DOD.” Now he wants all federal contracts screened for corrosion. He wants to change the policies governing Federal Acquisition Regulation, such that any contractor taking federal dollars must be overseen by a certified third-party corrosion officer—from NACE, or the Society for Protective Coatings, or some other agency. Dunmire calls this a final pillar and says it will reduce the cost of corrosion by 30 percent.

  Burton was down to the penultimate page of the script. He mentioned the sixth arena of Dunmire’s focus—training and certification—the purpose of which is to ensure that “there are always people truly qualified to carry on the war against corrosion.” Dunmire wants warriors to know their enemy, and certifies that they do. Since 2005, nearly two thousand military men—mostly from the navy—have taken corros
ion courses through NACE. It offers a five-day course and an accelerated half-day version. Only a hundred army soldiers have taken either. For painters, the Society for Protective Coatings now offers DOD-tailored courses on painting techniques and skills such as abrasive blasting, airless spraying, coating thickness—that kind of stuff. Three-quarters of the courses are taken by navy sailors; three-quarters of them pass the test at the end. Thanks to Dunmire’s efforts, the service academies are incorporating corrosion in their curricula. The United States Air Force Academy was the first to do this; the others are readying to deploy. The Defense Acquisition University is developing online corrosion courses on a far grander scale, for tens of thousands of service members and contractors. As of late 2012, its platform could handle a million users, but fewer than five hundred people had created accounts.

  “Perhaps the most innovative contribution of the training and certification team,” Burton said encouragingly, “is the University of Akron’s bachelor of science in corrosion engineering.” It’s the first and only corrosion degree in the country, and it was schemed up by Mike Baach, a former corrosion industry executive. Baach had founded and taken public in 1992 a company called Corrpro, and recognized a general unawareness of the potential benefits the rust industry could bring to the American economy. He also recognized a lack of skilled corrosion engineers he could hire. For thirty years, he’d dreamed of a college that offered an undergraduate corrosion engineering degree. When Dunmire came along, he introduced him to Sue Louscher, now the director of Akron’s program. Baach calls the undertaking his proudest accomplishment.

  Dunmire first got behind the program in 2006. Since 2008, when it was congressionally initiated, $35 million tax dollars have gone its way via the DOD. Doors opened in the fall of 2010; as of 2014, sixty students are enrolled, including a dozen in their final, fifth year. The way Larry Lee sees it, those students are guaranteed good, high-paying jobs as soon as they graduate. Many of the students have already joined a student chapter of NACE, which they call a corrosion squad. At NACE conferences, travelling in uniform, the corrosion squad resembles a track team without the bulging quads. Of the program at the University of Akron, Burton said, “It’s training the next generation.” Then he gave a funny look and said, “The Next Generation. I like the sound of that.”

  Star Trek jokes aside, Dunmire is dead serious about the program. It’s the pinnacle of STEM development, spitting out not just engineers but corrosion engineers. Taking full advantage of the educational opportunities, Dunmire has in the works “learning modules” created by “subject matter experts” at the University of Akron, edited by Bruno White studios, and deployed to tens of thousands of soldiers online via the Defense Acquisition University. Describing this plan and its “content,” Dunmire and his cohorts employ a great deal of new media jargon, making it hard to discern fantasy from reality.

  There’s one more STEM program, on Earth, that really excites Dunmire. As part of the office’s seventh and final arena—outreach—it funded a small exhibit at the Orlando Science Center called Corrosion: The Silent Menace. The exhibit debuted in March 2013, in Science Park, a section of the museum with displays on electricity and magnetism, lights and lasers, gravity, potential energy. The exhibit featured a fourteen-foot trestle bridge, with chipped paint, concrete breaking off, exposed rebar, spalling—a half dozen manifestations of corrosion. It had the sounds of traffic recorded from an actual bridge, but everything else was simulated. The concrete pedestal, the steel I beam, the steel bolts, the rust—all of it was made of plastic and paint. It seemed as silly as making fake dirt, or fake trash, when so much is so plainly available. It was like going to Taco Bell in Tlaxcala. The height of irony was spending $75,000 of our tax money to fake the look of decay, when the DOD is spending 266,000 times as much money to eliminate it. But you can’t have museumgoing kids getting crushed by a collapsing beam.

  Maybe kids don’t care—Dunmire is no child-education specialist. If the exhibit doesn’t excite kids, Dunmire figures at least it’ll expose them to rust. Daily, the museum plans to teach eighteen kids more about rust in a small classroom. There was even a career kiosk, with a recorded video intro by LeVar Burton. Dunmire wants the exhibit to serve as a template—a launchpad for rust exhibits nationwide. With private funding, he hopes that other museums will make copies for a quarter of the cost. In the meantime, he hopes that the Orlando Science Center, at least in ticket price if not attendance, is more appealing than Universal Studios.

  It’s LeVar Burton, though, that really puts a smile on Dunmire’s face. LeVar Burton talking about rust exemplifies the outreach that is unique to Dunmire. The videos have wide appeal and captivate civilians, or he hopes they will. He’s counting on it. “Darryl wrote it, but it’s my script,” Dunmire said of LeVar 5. “This is what I wanted. This is mine. This one’s mine, all mine. This is it.” Dunmire also calls the office his baby.

  More than once, Dunmire refused to give me a cost per production of the LeVar videos. He got touchy, said it was impossible to pull out the cost of one movie when they were all commingled and budgeted with other related projects, insisted that he follows federal rules and contracting procedures, said he’d get back to me on a ballpark figure but only guaranteed that they cost less than $300,000 each (most of which went to editing). At the same time, he reminded me that his office is the most audited in DOD and said, “I’m a frugal sonofabitch.”

  By three thirty, LeVar was almost as tired as Dunmire. He goofed up: said “fuel surprise” instead of “fuel supplies.” He said, “I may make it look easy, but this shit’s work. There’s only so much juice in the battery. I degrade. I rust, Dan.” Dunmire laughed. Soon after, in the middle of another take, the jib crane squeaked, so Burton had to take two. He grimaced.

  Dunmire flipped to the last page of the script and said, “The big finish.” Burton said, “Get your Kleenex box ready, because it’s gonna be poignant.” Per custom, he read: “Fighting corrosion is a job that’s never really finished, because, as we’ve said before, rust never sleeps.”

  Lord said, “That’s a wrap.” Dunmire and Burton hugged, patted each other on the back, and shook hands. Then Burton stepped outside to smoke.

  It took Dunmire years after he assumed his throne to discover how little faith others had in him. Neil Thompson, a former NACE president, wondered how he got anything done. “You’re not a linear thinker,” he once said accusingly. Paul Virmani, the author of the 2001 cost-of-corrosion study, doubted Dunmire’s abilities. “You’re not an engineer,” he said in the same accusatory tone. “How can you possibly do the job if you’re not an engineer?” Ric Sylvester, the longtime senior executive in the AT&L Office, told Dunmire that he made others look bad, and also jealous. (Sylvester also told Dunmire that he’d never succeed because he refuses to sacrifice his ideals.) When the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies asked Dunmire to join its peer review board, it performed a background check with current and former officials and servicemen. “We want you to know, you are not very well liked,” someone told Dunmire. “But you’re respected because you get things done.”

  Dunmire claims otherwise. He thinks of himself as one of the most disliked guys in the DOD, as unpopular as he was at Kent State. A muthafuckin’ sheriff he is not. He says it’s not respect that he’s earned so much as it is fear, the result of his refusal to brownnose. He knows that he’s a pain in the ass. When he gets read into a program, he says, others end up unhappy. “We are screwed,” they say.

  Dunmire doesn’t pay it any heed. “I don’t care. I do the job. I’m not here to kiss anybody’s ass. I stay within the boundaries.” He elaborated. “I’m serious, that’s why I’ve survived for ten years. I don’t cross the line.” Per custom, he fell back on his refrain: “I love the warrior.”

  Dunmire insists he’s no maverick (“I can be calm and rational; I just enjoy being crazy”) or jerk (“I’m not an asshole; I’m just passionate about what I do”) or corrupted official. For all his weirdne
ss, he’s never mean spirited or abrasive. He insists he’s following his own compass (“I know what I need to do next”) and that when he goes to the edge, he informs his command of his plans. He says he’s taking risks that need to be taken and that it’s his own tail on the line (“I’d rather be lucky than good”). Corrosion, he figures, demands a willingness to gamble (“Nothing gets done by playing it safe”) as much as it requires innovation (“We’re fighting the second law of thermodynamics, so you have to do interesting things”). Rust, he says, is tougher than paper. Often it’s difficult to justify (“It takes millions to save billions”). He hits his old refrain, that he loves what he does, and underlying it all is a love of the warrior.