The "wars" and the militarism is essentially just a tool to extract ever more money from the government, the economy, and tax payers in order to funnel them to wards the power brokers.
It's a kind of scam similar to a multilevel marketing scheme, which is quite similar to a run of the mill ponzi scam and quite similar to a simple protection racket. In case you don't know what a con job is, it is shorthand for "confidence trick", a type of scam where fostered confidence is manipulated in order to gain unfettered access to the direct target of the scheme, which is usually money.
In the case of war, the multilevel marketing scheme con job is all about fostering confidence in the military protecting us and our children from all kinds of bad guys. The problem though, as the military services sector and America quickly realized after the fall of the Soviet Union, is that you cannot justify your target handing over their earnings and writing over their assets if there is nothing to be scared and the bad guy just keeled over. If you remember or were paying attention during the 90s, you will recall that beyond the almost desperate nature of agitation to attack Iraq and Saddam (which also has its own illustrious history of lies and false flag type incidents), there was serious angst about how our military would justify unjustifiable expenditure into the foreseeable future. There was serious identity crisis in the late 90s military services sector. 9/11 was the like a huge birthday cake with all the icing already on top of it they could have ever wished for and the Al Qaeda colluding buffoons in the White House at the time were just the stripper jumping out of the cake.
The scary thing about it is that our government and our wealthy and out military services sector essentially dropped a gasoline bladder on a camp fire, instead of covering it with dirt and water; but will they be able to tame the demons they have let out and even if they can, will it not have contributed to draining our attention and resources from developing and building our own society to compete in the future instead of being mired in battles with primitive mindsets.
Personally, I think it will once be written that the USA was a short lived power that succumbed to internal saboteurs that drove the USA off a cliff for selfish greed and allowed it to be overtaken by the more focused and deliberate China. We have always been our own worst enemy.
Were does the US military budget money get spent? A small portion goes on wages, but every soldier needs equipment, food, and requires infrastructure. This is mostly provided by private companies. "Defence" companies are in the top lobbyists by expenditure, at about $200M each per year. They lobby hard to get the lucrative contracts to provide all the above and more (e.g. the F-35 program).
Who pays for all this? The government of course. And where does the government get its money? The tax payers. I.e. the public.
So the reasoning goes that the industrial military complex exists to transfer money from the public, via the government, to private companies.
Actual expenses in 2012 show that military pay and benefits accounts for 34.6% of the DoD budget, with total pay and benefits (including civilian) accounting for 47.8%. According to a CBO report I read in 2010, the growth in personnel costs for the military was one of the biggest concerns for long term budget planning. The vast majority of the military servicemen costs are due to the cost of providing healthcare, because the military isn't exempt or immune to the cost growth experienced in that sector.
As an additional aside, expected outlays for the post-9/11 GI bill are much higher than initial estimates because the cost of college has grown so much and the benefits are transferrable.
Given your definition of "spending other people's money on something that doesn't benefit them or their [idealized notions of] society", this fits far more in the camp of conservative wordplay. Liberals--at least according to the US conservative political narrative--love to "steal" other people's money to spend it on something that doesn't benefit them directly. Or so the conservatives charge. It is rare--if even that frequently--to hear American liberals refer to the spending of public money as "theft" in public discourse.
