In the end, it is hard to accept your premise that the three recent wars were about nothing. Think of the Syracuse expedition by Athenians or the consecutive invasions of Persians in Greece to pick of just two pre modern capitalist examples. If you were contemporary to these events you could also say that indeed they were about nothing. Both societies were faring pretty well in their space and their trade routes and livelihood did not NEED the war to happen. NO, I have to agree with previous comments that war is a quest for domination (my penis/ego/car is bigger than yours raised to the nth) and not an inherently capitalist creation. Capitalism simply harnesses the creative destruction power of war more efficiently (and its profit making potential).

As for the space race, I do not see how it changes your point. It is an extension of the existing war domain made critical due to advances in technology.

Btw. thank you for the diary as it generates discussion.

Orthodoxy is not a religion.

The tandem rationale to market expansion is "exemplary" war. It is an older but no less useful, self-serving cultural expression of political domination by a minority group. Being in the minority, economically, is a tenuous position actually. Periodic demonstrations of superior intelligence, resources, agreement, and opportunity are needed to consolidate and sustain magical power over others or annihilate evidence of the fundamental weaknesses of the minority. Domestically, starving the majority is a tried and true test. Internationally, to rebuke one's peers in the realm, genocide is the standard tactic. Sartre made this point in 1967, which is one that I'd hope to emphasize by the end of this comment.

Here, I'll affirm what you don't quite scream, that the public acceptance of war is always required for its prosecution; that is a simple, practical matter for governors of states who profess a semblence of democracy. And when national identity is so completely bound to capitalism's morality and acquisition economic goods, as in the US, it stands to reason that the "perfect" efficiency and unlimited potential of productive society should not be bound. Growth of the nation, one and all, slips easily into the conscious identity of the patriot and the unconscious desire to belong, to be needed and recognized by one's peers. One is the micro-cosmic "example" for being that is projected by secular propaganda on war's justification.

In a theocratic nation-state, religious devotion is a great substitute for personal gain.

In totalitarian states throughout modern history, public acceptance is not required; participation is compulsory on pain of death, and even then, even if one has performed one's duty perfectly, one is still subject to arbitrary demonstrations of state domination. Solzhenitsyn makes this point in his memoir of "sanitary" troop deployments and "patriotic" civilians' internment during the campaign of 1941.

As for the postmodern, postcolonial era of warfare: there are, I think, quite a few layers of the idea of "nothing" having to do with historical memory, as opposed to state leadership, that wants unpacking -- or the truth waiting to be "unveiled".

First, "nothing" is a whole philosopical exercise :) Nothing, like death, cannot be known for it cannot be tested, personally. Nothing, like opportunity cost, cannot be realized. These concepts are forever postulated and so exquisitely acceptable and vulnerable to industrial production values and imagination of a consumer class. In the US, immortality is imaginable and has been depicted countless, entertaining ways since the invention of television. The convergence of immortality and the means and needs of The Right Capitalists to preserve their minority power are denoted by this period of modernist enlightenment -- Nixon, Viet Nam conflict. This is not to understate at all dominating justification and narrative arcs of war: capitalist expansion, genocide which is exactly war.

At the Second  Session of the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal on Viet Nam, 1967, Sartre asserted:

All genocide is a product of history and it always carries the signs of the society from which it springs. The case which we have to judge concerns the largest contemporary capitalist power. It is as such that we must attempt to consider it; in other words, inasmuch as it expresses the economic structure, the political aims and the contradictions of that power.
...
This is because:  [paraphrasing, cf. citation]

• Competition between the industrialized nations fighting over new markets engenders a permanent hostility which is expressed, both in theory and in practice, by what is called `bourgeois nationalism'.
• The development of industry enables the production of more and more massively lethal arms.
• The factories, even if they are not working for the armies, do comprise the economic potential of a country. Therefore, the destruction of this potential becomes the aim of the war and the means by which it may be won.
• Everybody is mobilized. The worker tends to become a fighter because, in the end, it is the strongest economic power that has the greatest chance of winning.
• The democratic evolution of the bourgeois countries interests the masses in politics. The masses do not control the decisions of the state, but gradually gain a self-awareness. In this way war becomes total.
• Technologically advanced societies do not cease to enlarge upon the field of competition in multiplying the means of communication. The well-known `One World' of the Americans already existed at the end of the nineteenth century. War is total  because its risk embraces the whole world.