Critical Aerospace Screws Face Years-Long Wait for US Buyers
Ball screws essential to missiles and aircraft are in short supply, with procurement timelines stretching years due to a thin domestic manufacturing base.
A specialized fastener used in American missiles and military aircraft has become a critical bottleneck in the defense supply chain, with buyers sometimes waiting years to secure components that appear deceptively simple. Ball screws — precision-machined parts that convert rotational motion into linear movement — are indispensable to weapons systems and aerospace platforms, yet only a handful of domestic manufacturers are capable of producing them to military specifications.
Saginaw Precision, a Michigan-based firm, is among the rare American companies that can engineer and manufacture these components. The company has developed ball screw prototypes intended for defense applications, underscoring both the technical difficulty of the work and the narrow field of qualified suppliers available to Pentagon procurement officers.
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The supply constraint reflects a broader vulnerability in the U.S. defense industrial base, where decades of offshoring and consolidation have left critical niches — particularly in precision machining — dependent on very few domestic sources. When demand surges, as it has amid ongoing global conflicts and military modernization efforts, lead times can stretch to multiple years even for components that are not, at first glance, technologically exotic.
Defense analysts have repeatedly flagged single-point-of-failure suppliers as a systemic risk, and ball screws illustrate why: a weapons program can be delayed not by a missing warhead or engine, but by a screw. Efforts to expand capacity require substantial capital investment, a trained machinist workforce, and time — none of which can be conjured quickly in response to an urgent procurement need.
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