For years, pictures shared on social media have shown U.S. Navy ships covered in rust, making them look like they’d been at sea for far too long.
Now, Navy Secretary John Phelan said he has a mandate from President Donald Trump: “Fix the damn rust.”
“He has stated to me many times: ‘Shipbuilding, shipbuilding, shipbuilding. Get those ships out of maintenance yards. Fix the damn rust,’” Phelan said on Wednesday. “He does not like it, and I don’t like getting calls in the middle of the night.”
In his first public comments since he was confirmed last month, Phelan said Trump “understands the importance of reviving the maritime industrial base” and has made expanding shipbuilding a top priority of his administration. Phelan’s comments came at the Navy League Sea-Air-Space 2025 conference at National Harbor, Maryland.
The issue of the Navy’s rusting fleet came up during Phelan’s Feb. 27 confirmation hearing, when Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) showed a recent picture of the destroyer USS Dewey caked in orange rust.
“Please don’t give that to President Trump because I’ll get a text at like one in the morning,” Phelan said at the time.
Phelan also told Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) that he would focus on the fight against rust if confirmed.
Of course, as every sailor knows, rust is a constant for ships at sea, said retired Navy Capt. Bradley Martin, a senior policy researcher with the RAND Corporation.
“The fact is it’s saltwater, and ships corrode, and as a result, they don’t always look good,” Martin told Task & Purpose on Wednesday. “And the pace of operations and such has just made it very difficult for ships to keep up with that challenge.”
Fighting rust and corrosion involves stripping a ship’s paint down to the metal, applying primer, and repainting, said Martin, who spent 30 years as a surface warfare officer in the Navy. Only some of that can be done while a ship is at sea.
The Navy’s current operations tempo combined with the limited number of U.S. shipyards make it difficult to schedule times when ships can be repaired and repainted, he said.
When ships are in the yards, there is often a lag between when their paint is removed and a new coat is applied, allowing rust to form, Martin said.
Another problem is that some spots on a ship — like along the waterline — are hard to reach at sea, Martin said. Sailors call such hard-to-reach places “rust makers.”
In addition to fixing the Navy’s rust problem, Phelan vowed to work with defense companies to address the nation’s lack of enough shipbuilding workers, which has had a direct effect on the lives of sailors and Marines, he said.
“We are facing a serious shortage in our shipbuilding workforce, which is stressing our deployment schedules, exacerbating the strain on our current forces, therefore leading to extended deployments, overstretched crews, and increased burnout,” Phelan said.
Trump is also focused on expanding the shipbuilding industry, said Phelan, who jokingly added: “I certainly don’t want to disappoint him. If I do, you’ll probably have another SECNAV here in a year or two.”
UPDATE: 04/09/2025: This story was updated with Navy Secretary John Phelan’s comments from his Feb. 27 confirmation hearing.
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