Maybe I missed a point in the article, but I feel a broader shift that produced this situation is simply that the US is no longer building huge numbers of new factories and industrial processes that need lots of new machine tools.
We have left that phase of our country's development behind. We have relatively piecemeal demand for such tools, aside from the random new Tesla factory. And that kind of growth is what spurs development and maintenance of these kinds of supporting industries.
As a country, you fall out of the practice of building stuff, and the talent or ecosystem of it migrates away.
Look at railroad building. In China, they have entire industries of people building the tools for building railroads. They can call up 100 experts on design just for EV battery building machine tools and factory processes. Here you're lucky if you can find that many experts on any machine tool topic across all the contractor companies that have had to consolidate to make keeping this kind of talent sustainable. We just don't have this deep practiced industry knowledge in general across many businesses any more. And aside from some specialized centers (NASA, NIST, national labs) that doesn't exist much in the government either. We've outsourced it.
Maybe it's a natural evolution of a country. Maybe the tide can be turned with strategic investment, I don't know.
> The US is still a major purchaser of machine tools (2nd in the world behind China), but unlike for most of the 20th century, today its factories are full of machines made elsewhere.
We have left that phase of our country's development behind. We have relatively piecemeal demand for such tools, aside from the random new Tesla factory. And that kind of growth is what spurs development and maintenance of these kinds of supporting industries.
As a country, you fall out of the practice of building stuff, and the talent or ecosystem of it migrates away.
Look at railroad building. In China, they have entire industries of people building the tools for building railroads. They can call up 100 experts on design just for EV battery building machine tools and factory processes. Here you're lucky if you can find that many experts on any machine tool topic across all the contractor companies that have had to consolidate to make keeping this kind of talent sustainable. We just don't have this deep practiced industry knowledge in general across many businesses any more. And aside from some specialized centers (NASA, NIST, national labs) that doesn't exist much in the government either. We've outsourced it.
Maybe it's a natural evolution of a country. Maybe the tide can be turned with strategic investment, I don't know.