warships

For years, the Navy has essentially ignored the issues associated with rusting ships, said the man officially tasked with fixing the problem. However, it became a priority in February 2025 after President Donald Trump saw a picture of the Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer USS Dewey covered in “running rust” as it pulled into Singapore last year. You can read more about that in our original story here. The Navy’s chronic rust issue and the negative optics surrounding it is a topic we have been covering for nearly a decade.

“We know what to do, but we choose not to do it,” Mark Lattner, director of the Navy’s Ship Integrity and Performance Engineering, Naval Systems Engineering Directorate, said during a panel at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium on Tuesday that TWZ attended. “And we choose not to do it because there’s always some other problem I’ve got to fix. I don’t have time. Our corrosion can wait. And so we don’t implement the fixes.”

Finding a solution to the Navy’s rust problem became one of Lattner’s main missions in the wake of the fallout from Trump’s late-night texts to Navy officials demanding answers.

While it can make ships look like “rusting garbage scows,” Lattner noted, this issue isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. Unaddressed rust and corrosion on Navy ships has downstream effects on maintenance and readiness.

Some of the solutions are “simple,” Lattner suggested, like wider use of polysiloxane paint, “originally developed as an anti-graffiti paint, very robust, very good paint, easy to clean.”

“It might be as simple as putting a good scupper on the ship, diverting the water away from the ship,” Lattner said of the drain openings on a vessel’s bulwark. “If we can use materials that are inherently less prone to rust, that’s great. That includes composites, includes stainless steel, other things like that.”

Reducing the work load of sailors and the margin for error is another solution.

“How do we make it more sailor friendly, things like single pack paints, right?” Lattner noted. “Sailors mix multiple components together. There’s always inherent things that could go wrong. If you use a single pack thing, they break the pack open, they mix it together. They’re good to go. Try and take away work from the sailors.”

Having sailors do more rust-preventative maintenance themselves will also help.

“Don’t just cover up the rest by painting it over again,” Lattner stated. “Just tell the sailor to go and clean it off. And we’ve got special cleaners that make it easier to clean it.”

After being asked by the Chief of Naval Operations how be knows he is getting a handle on the problem, Lattner answered that there is a new evaluation process.

“We’ve identified ways to input the data and go around and survey the ship so we actually know what’s going on with the ships,” he said. “In this particular thing, we developed an app that you use on your phone, and so when the TYCOMS walk around and inspect the ships, they can actually kind of check off, ‘yeah, this looks good. This doesn’t look good. This needs improvement.’”

“The ships come up with a grade,” Lattner added. “One of the things we did, rather than make it just qualitative, we actually give them a quantitative number. So I can actually say this is how good ships are.”

There are also improvements in training underway, with teams teaching sailors the best and easiest ways to paint ships.

“These guys are experts,” said Lattner. “They bring the technology, the tools, all the things that are holding sailors back from being able to do the job properly.”

Teams of contractors are helping to do some of the work that sailors can’t, something that is key given how the Navy avoids keeping ships offline for extended periods of time.

These teams “go in there and actually execute the corrosion control work  They’ll install the things like the scuppers. They’ll put on the films. They’ll do some preservation. They’ll do cleaning, getting the ships better. And what we’re doing is not trying to eat the elephant all at once, but one bite at a time, right?”

Some of the solutions go beyond what the Navy can do on its own, Lattner pointed out. Industry has a big role to play too.

“They can help actually do the preservation work. They can help do the development of technology. Even though we have a lot of good technology, and we know what we can do, we’re always looking for better ideas. Are there better ways to do preservation? Are there better ways to remove the old paint? Are there more robust solutions that we can implement?”

Lattner also seeks changes in future ship designs that will reduce rust and corrosion and improve the ease of maintenance.

Even if all these solutions are implemented, the Navy will never have the same kind of shiny ships that cruise lines do.

For instance, Carnival Cruise Line is “constantly touching things up,” Lattner proffered. “They swarm the ship when it gets back in, touching things up, keeping things up to speed. When they do [maintenance in port] availabilities, their availabilities are very tight, right? They’re short. They’ll, they’ll never use a company again if they don’t meet those, those timelines.”

The Navy does not have that luxury.

“We in the Navy are unfortunately kinder and gentler, right?” Lattner postulated. “So right, wrong or indifferent. I’m more tolerant. The longer I wait between different evolutions, the more likely things are going to go south, right? And we’ll have to work with that, right? There’s no great solution.”

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

Ever since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1998, the United States has attempted to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution. They have tried everything short of a full-scale military invasion: a military coup, selecting a substitute president, cutting off access to the global financial system, imposing layers of sanctions, sabotaging the electricity grid, sending in mercenaries, and attempting to assassinate its leaders. If you can think of a method to overthrow a government, the United States has likely tried it against Venezuela.

However, in 2025, the escalation became unmistakable. The US sent its warships to patrol Venezuela’s coast, began sinking small boats and killing those on board as they left the South American mainland, and seized an oil tanker bound for Cuba. The quantity of attacks on Venezuela has increased, suggesting the quality of the threats has now reached a different magnitude. It feels as if the United States is preparing for a full-blown invasion of the country.

Donald Trump came to office saying that he was opposed to military interventions that did not further US interests, which is why he called the illegal US war on Iraq a waste of “blood and treasure”. This does not mean Trump is against the use of the US military – he deployed it in Afghanistan (remember the “Mother of all Bombs”) and Yemen, and has fully backed the US/Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. His formula is not for or against war categorically, but about what the US would gain from it. With Iraq, he stated that the problem was not the war itself, but the failure to seize Iraqi oil. Had the US taken Iraq’s oil, Trump would likely have been in Baghdad, ready to build – with Iraqi treasure – a Trump hotel on one of the former presidential properties.

Naturally, the US military buildup in the Caribbean is about Venezuelan oil – the largest known reserves in the world. The US-backed politician, Maria Corina Machado, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just this week after supporting the Israeli genocide and calling for a US invasion of her own country, is on record promising to open up her country’s resources to foreign capital. She would welcome the extraction of Venezuela’s wealth rather than allow its social wealth to better the lives of its own people, as is the goal of the Bolivarian Revolution started by Hugo Chávez. A hypothetical “President Machado” would immediately surrender any claim to the Essequibo region and grant ExxonMobil full command of Venezuela’s oil reserves. This is certainly the prize.

But it is not the immediate spur. A close reading of the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States shows that there is a renewed emphasis on the Western Hemisphere. The Trump Corollary to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine is clear: the Western Hemisphere must be under US control, and the United States will do what it takes to ensure that only pro-US politicians hold power. It is worth reading that section of the National Security Strategy:

“After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.”

When Argentina faced local elections, Trump warned that the US would cut off external financing if candidates opposing pro-US President Javier Milei lost. In Honduras, Trump intervened directly to oppose the Libre Party, even offering to release a convicted drug trafficker (and former President). The United States is moving aggressively because it has accurately assessed the weakness of the Pink Tide and the strength of a new, far-right “Angry Tide”. The emergence of right-wing governments across South America, Central America, and the Caribbean has emboldened the US to squeeze Venezuela and thereby weaken Cuba – the two major poles of the Latin American left. Overturning these revolutionary processes would allow a full-scale Monroe Doctrine domination of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Since the 1990s, the United States began to speak of Latin America as a partner for shared prosperity, emphasizing globalization over direct control. Now, the language has changed. As the Trump Corollary asserts: “We want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets and that supports critical supply chains…We want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations.” Latin America is seen as a battlefield for geopolitical competition against China and a source of threats like immigration and drug trafficking. The attack on Venezuela and Cuba is not merely an assault on these two countries; it is the opening salvo of direct US intervention on behalf of the Angry Tide. This will not deliver better lives for the population, but greater wealth for US corporations and the oligarchies of Latin America.

Trump is ready to revive the belief that any problem can be solved by military force, even when other tools exist. The Trump Corollary promises to use its “military system superior to any country in the world” to steal the hemisphere’s resources.

The aggression against Venezuela is not a war against Venezuela alone. It is a war against all of Latin America.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with Inkani Books.

Source: Globetrotter