72 Trilly I'm sure you know more about this than me, but it's my understanding that dollars don't matter in America because we can print unlimited money. The purpose of dollars is to make other nations in debt in USD. If they can only pay the debt in dollars then they have to sell their own nation's resources to the US in order to get USD. This keeps the treats flowing north. The US will happily give out loans to countries they know will never be paid because as long as they are in debt they will have to sell their resources.

I don't know enough about local US production, but I imagine it is one of the many contradictions of the globalized economy.

Yeah, I think this is the point of Michael Hudson, Emmanuel Todd, and others. That "GDP" as we understand it is mostly hogwash, that dollars are great but a lot of what passes for "the economy" is tied up in fictitious capital that when push comes to shove does not produce goods, and can't be switched to wartime production. So much of the US and the rest of the countries that have embraced neoliberal economics in particular are so wedded to real estate and financialisation that Russia can outproduce them in artillery shells and the like, even though Russia's GDP is like 3% that of the Global North. From a very recent interview with Todd here:

War becomes a test of political economy, it is the great revealer. The GDP of Russia and Belarus represents 3.3% of Western GDP (the US, Anglosphere, Europe, Japan, South Korea), practically nothing. One can ask oneself how this insignificant GDP can cope and continue to produce missiles.

The reason is that GDP is a fictional measure of production. If we take away from the American GDP half of its overbilled health spending, then the “wealth produced” by the activity of its lawyers, by the most filled prisons in the world, then by an entire economy of ill-defined services, including the “production” of its 15 to 20 thousand economists with an average salary of 120,000 dollars, we realize that an important part of this GDP is water vapor.

Yup that's correct, the beauty of this machine is that they're able to outsource most resource extraction and manufacturing to foreign countries which is a great thing since they avoid destroying their own land and massively climb the value ladder to generate super profits

And even though they tried to keep crucial manufacturing domestic like the arms industry, the corruption of private industries and vast financialization of their economy has greatly hurt their manufacturing capabilities

Correct (except for the petrodollar part, see below), as long as a commodity is for sale in dollar, America can get it for free. This was how the US built an entire global supply chain centered around exporting its industrial capacity to China, and have its “free lunch” simply by printing money. The problem with defense is that nobody is going to want to sell their military equipments to America to be used against them (except maybe the Europeans).

The neoliberalization of the US military industrial complex came after the collapse of the USSR, which was preceded immediately by the total and complete domination of the US military weaponry against the Soviet-armed Iraqi army during the 1991 Gulf War. With almost zero significant losses, it became clear that the US military hardware was so far ahead of the Soviet armament (at least the export variants) that after the fall of the USSR, together with the collapse of the Soviet arms industry, America no longer needs to build up its weaponry anymore. China was still irrelevant at that point.

So, how can the MIC continue to survive when America has no more enemies to challenge them? Through grifting. By proposing and promising next generation military equipments that are so impossibly complex, and require endless upgrades to become even minimally operational, the US Federal Government was sucked into a spiral of perpetually financing military projects that serve more as “luxury items” than suitable for operations in actual modern warfare.

The F-35 program, for example, is now over-budgeted by trillions of dollars, is teemed with hundreds of severe defects with no permanent fixes in sight, requires complex maintenance and logistics that are completely unrealistic in a real war. A state-of-the-art Formula 1 race car, if you will, that is over-engineered for urban asphalt roads at best, and completely useless for gravel and rocky terrain at worst.

The only way out for the US to regain its military strength is the re-industrialization of its military industrial sector, which is not going to happen because it runs counter to the benefits of the financial capitalists i.e. Wall Street. This is why the US today has only a single factory in Akron, OH that still produces the M1 Abrams main battle tank, at a production rate of 1 to 12 per year. Russia can easily produce a hundred of their MBTs, perhaps even more now after the SMO, each year.

Regarding petrodollar - I see this “myth” kept getting perpetuated among the anti-imperialist circles. It is true that the dollarization of fossil fuel commodity is one of the means through which the US exerts its control over the energy importing countries through monetary imperialism. However, it is far from the only manner from which the US dollar derives its monetary power. The end of petrodollar is objectively beneficial to many developing countries that rely on earning dollars to purchase fuel, but it wouldn’t cause anything more than a minor dent to the hegemonic status of the US dollar.