In an ailing economy....wars keep more of the masses employed....especially in a system that is seeing a mass exodus of the manufacturing sector.
But the biggest winners are those in the war business. The manufacturers of bullets and guns, the military political machine, and most of all, the war time investors.
Long before the Federal Reserve was formed, Adam Smith pretty much had it figured out. Back then, the investors of war were the private investors, lending money to the state....the more expansive the war, the higher the interest rate and de facto higher profit margins.
The only discrepance in Adam Smith's assessment back in the 1750's versus today's US wartime climate...the government doesn't raise taxes today in order to pay for wars....but instead defer the cost to future generations.
Was the "founder of Capitalism" a flaming liberal?
From Wealth of Nations, ...Subsection Public Debt...page 1171..paragraph 1.
Smith describing the private war time investors.....
...."By means of borrowing they are enabled, with a very moderate increase in taxes, to raise, from year to year, money sufficient for carrying on the war, and by the practice of perpetual funding they are enabled, with the smallest possible increase in taxes, to raise annually the largest possible sum of money. In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them,, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on the account of the war, and those that they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of war.
I'm not one to believe that the real reason Obama debated back and forth with his national security team was to line the pockets of BAE, Boeing, Raython, etc. Yes, the defense industry does have power, and it did grow exponentially in the Bush years, but it is getting reigned back in. I also they have as much influence as you say, see the F-22 choice, and the idea to cut Future Combat Systems. I think you are stretching way too much. That is not the real reason at all.