Why America Deliberately Destroyed It's Machine Tool Industry?
In 1945, the United States built more machine tools than the rest of the world combined. Machine tools are the machines that make every other machine, the lathes, mills, and grinders behind every car, aircraft, and artillery shell a nation produces. Today America ranks fourth in the world, behind China, and when the Army moved to multiply artillery shell production for Ukraine, the machines themselves were the bottleneck. This documentary traces how that happened, and shows that the collapse was not simply the work of Japanese competition, the 1981 recession, or the CNC transition. It followed documented decisions, made in boardrooms and in the Cabinet Room of the White House, that remain on file.
The story begins in Precision Valley, the stretch of the Black River around Springfield, Vermont, where Jones & Lamson, Fellows Gear Shaper, and Bryant Chucking Grinder made one small town a world capital of precision manufacturing, producing by local accounting a fifth of America's machine tools during World War II. It follows the American invention of numerical control, funded by the Air Force and demonstrated at MIT in 1952, and how the technology was aimed at aerospace while Japanese builders standardized it, undercut American prices, and delivered in weeks instead of a year.
At the center of the film is Houdaille Industries, the Florida conglomerate that owned Los Angeles machine tool builder Burgmaster. In May 1979, Houdaille became the test case for the modern leveraged buyout, taken private by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts with borrowed money that redirected the company's cash from new machines to debt service. Three years later, the same company petitioned Washington with a 714-page brief alleging a Japanese cartel. The Senate backed it unanimously. Then, on April 22, 1983, a declassified White House briefing paper prepared for President Reagan shows the administration's own working group, chaired by OMB deputy director Edwin Harper, conceding in writing that the industry was being damaged while unanimously recommending no action, handled quietly, with a press plan that read "None." The petition was rebuffed within days. Burgmaster was auctioned in 1986, and three years after refusing to act, the same government declared machine tools "a small yet vital component of the U.S. defense base" and signed National Security Decision Directive 226, after roughly half of all American machine tool companies had already closed.
The film weighs the honest counterarguments, including the genuine superiority of Japanese machines and the rise of Haas Automation in high-cost California, then follows the same financial mechanism through Bridgeport, Warner & Swasey, Cincinnati Milacron, and Ingersoll, through Springfield's 2002 shutdown and brownfield demolition, and into the present, where Hardinge, the 130-year-old Elmira precision builder that inherited the Bridgeport name, was taken private with debt in 2018 and liquidated in 2024, while China became the world's largest producer, consumer, and exporter of machine tools and the Pentagon spends billions rebuilding shell production around machines America no longer makes at scale.
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Sources:
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