If you want to understand anything, consider what drives it, not the objectives.

As Julius Caesar is reputed to have said, you can do anything with spears, except sit on them.

So we have an enormous military industrial complex. Why?

Prior to World War 2, was the Great Depression. It should be noted that the federal debt really began with the New Deal. So not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital as well. With the war, this switched to building up the military. Remember War Bonds!

We like to think of money as a commodity to mine out of the economy, but it functions as a contract, where the asset is eventually backed by a debt.

While markets need money to circulate, people see it as signal to extract and store. The medium has become the message. Though blood is a medium, while fat is a store. They don't mix well.

So ask yourself, could the capital markets function, without the government siphoning up trillions in essentially surplus investment money? No. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth. Not to mention the rest of the economy geared towards creating debt, as opposed to a healthy society.

The wars are just an overflow pipe. That's why they are so incredibly inept, but no one is taken out and shot, just given more money.