The Times found the one part of a Patriot missile the president left out of his U.N. speech. By five this morning I had thirty-one of them on my kitchen table.
The president never promised screws. I want that on the record before the Times piece on the ball screw shortage reaches anybody’s brother-in-law. At the United Nations last Tuesday he said “we have more munitions than we could ever possibly even think of using, and we’re building them at levels that we have never done before,” and PBS printed it word for word. Munitions. A ball screw is a part, and parts are their own line item. The White House already pulled MS NOW’s press passes, partly over a report that the war had “significantly depleted” our munitions, so the Times said screws. That paper knows how to read a room.
Farah Stockman went to Saginaw, Michigan, for the Times. The ball screw sits inside the actuator that steers a missile’s fins, it’s accurate to about a hundredth of the width of a human hair, a missile needs at least four, and one can take a year to make. Nick Kolar, a sales executive at Umbragroup, an Italian company with a plant in Saginaw, told her the shortage “has created a choke point.” I respect that term. In any war somebody holds the choke point, and according to the New York Times, it’s us.
Forty Weeks Late Is a Sign of Demand
Raytheon won a contract in August to take Tomahawk production from fewer than 90 a year to 1,000, and the customers calling Kolar for screws wanted them in 12 weeks. “We can’t do that. It’s a new design to us. We’re looking at a year,” Kolar said. So he’s 40 weeks off the ask, and in pharmaceutical sales, my day job, a 40-week backorder is how you know the doctors want it.
Rika Jain, whose company got so tired of chasing screws that it opened its own shop in Michigan, put it best: “Ball screws have been a bottleneck, are currently a bottleneck and will continue to be a bottleneck.” Three tenses, one message. I’d hire her tomorrow. A missile that costs millions waiting a year on a $1,000 screw might, possibly, be something for procurement to look at. I’ll let the Italians worry about that.
My Answer to the Ball Screw Shortage Was in a Kitchen Drawer
The Times says the mechanism “might not look out of place in a junk drawer,” so at 4:30 I took the ball screw shortage into my own hands and dumped ours on the kitchen table. Thirty-one screws, two zip ties, a pen from a statin launch dinner and all three letters from the homeowners association. I checked every thread with gun-show calipers against a strand of Patton’s fur, which is thicker than a human hair and gives us margin.
Patton carried one screw out the back door and buried it by the fence, and a strategic reserve is exactly what I’d have ordered.
The other thirty are in a padded envelope addressed to Moog, the actuator company outside Buffalo that supplies Lockheed. Its chief executive said in July that “the critical concern now is the expansion of industrial capacity.” The post office opens at 8:30. I’m expanding it by thirty.
Nobody Audits the Quartermaster Under Fire
Lockheed Martin signed a deal with the administration in January to triple Patriot production. Lockheed was also on the ballroom donor list the White House released last October. Those are two separate facts, and a man who sets them side by side in wartime is doing Tehran’s homework for free.
The small-shop survivor in the Times piece is Pat O’Brien in Bay City, whose nine people run lathes from the 1950s that he rebuilt himself. He credits the old machines. Our junk drawer goes back to 2003, which puts my supply chain half a century ahead of his. And still a newspaper sent a reporter all the way to Saginaw to report a ball screw shortage, in a country where every kitchen has a drawer full of screws. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
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