I don't disagree with your point, but I think it's worth adding that journalist Naomi Klein wrote "The Shock Doctrine"[1], a book which outlines numerous examples in the past 100 years where government officials worldwide have chosen military actions specifically with economic goals in mind.
The book misrepresents capitalism somewhat, but the journalistic research and examples presented provide a compelling case that there are people who have a "sane" or "rational" (from their perspective) view that they (and maybe some others) could gain economically from war.
What's interesting is that civilization simulators (like Civilization, Europa Universalis, etc) don't take this into account. In those games, military action almost exclusively leads to major losses that are only made up for if 1) you won and 2) you gain a huge advantage from taking the territory you fought over. Even then it takes significant time.
Looking back at the technological innovations that came about at the early part of the last century simply due to the war effort, I have to wonder why it seems like no simulation games allow you to take advantage of that fact. Why couldn't declaring war with the right amount of propaganda lead to a massive spike in productivity and technical advancement?
> Looking back at the technological innovations that came about at the early part of the last century simply due to the war effort, I have to wonder why it seems like no simulation games allow you to take advantage of that fact. Why couldn't declaring war with the right amount of propaganda lead to a massive spike in productivity and technical advancement?
Largely, becaues those acheivements are a result of prioritizing R&D in wartime (devoting more resources to it), and those simulators don't give you much incentive to deprioritize R&D outside of war. If you downplayed the direct "war weariness" effect and instead required devoting output to otherwise nonproductive ends (entertainment, consumable consumer goods, etc.) to maintain morale, and had long-term sortages of those produce unhappiness, then you could model that effect better.
"What's interesting is that civilization simulators (like Civilization, Europa Universalis, etc) don't take this into account."
That's an AI problem moreso than an economic problem. Modern warfare has elements of both chess and poker (and others of course, but roll with me here). The chess elements come from accumulating threats and counterthreats and so on which are all important, even if they never manifest. For a clear real-world example, look at the North Korea standoff, which has frozen the same basic threat/counter-threat model in place for decades; North Korea can not win a war, but they can cause more damage then its worth before we can destroy their ability to damage South Korea. It's a very "chess" situation, only there's no clear endgame. The problem is that in the context of those games, the computer players aren't smart enough to engage at that level of strategy; at most, if you build up a large force you'll make them "nervous" and they unconditionally attack, and that only for game balance reasons, not realism. The computer players are not able to take in a complicated situation and understand it deeply enough to participate in truly modern power struggles.
Your last suggestion is game unbalancing; in that case, everyone will simply be in a perpetual state of open total warfare, from the instant you start that bonus. That might be a viable game but it certainly would be a different game.
The book misrepresents capitalism somewhat, but the journalistic research and examples presented provide a compelling case that there are people who have a "sane" or "rational" (from their perspective) view that they (and maybe some others) could gain economically from war.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine