By Sid Perkins
Rust
Jonathan Waldman
Simon & Schuster, $26.95
The No. 1 threat to the U.S. Navy isn’t a foreign adversary. It’s corrosion. And many admirals say they’re losing the battle. What the Department of Defense spends dealing with corrosion each year would buy two brand new aircraft carriers or a few dozen fighter jets. The annual bill for the United States as a whole is an estimated $437 billion — about 3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Corrosion’s cost is, in fact, higher than that of all natural disasters combined.