What about those who are there to report on the war? Winston Churchill, covering the Boer War in 1899, “took 40 bottles of wine, 18 bottles of 10-year-old Scotch and 12 bottles of Rose’s Old Lime Juice. Although he rarely finished his cigars, he smoked about nine of them a day, a heroic total by any standards.” I don’t know if he liked the war, but I’m certain he had a high old time while he was there! 
Book:
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
by veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges
It is a discussion of the question from the inside. Not light reading though. The title is not exactly ironic. Bitter, perhaps.
Depends if you have a loaded interpretation of “profit from it” or not.
If being a soldier is your profession, it could be said you profit from war. If a company builds planes or bombs or guns, it could be said that it profits from war. However, this would be a childishly simplistic way of looking at the role of the military in today’s world. The armed forces of nations today serve to be ready for war in order to prevent war. It would be more accurate to say that there are those who profit from the possibility of war.
Do they “like” it (another loaded term)? Well, if you sell insurance for a living, do you “like” insurance? If a company makes laser-guided bombs, do its owners/shareholders “like” laser-guided bombs?
Former Delta Force operator Eric Haney said in his memoir that although he hated the waste and destruction of war, he couldn’t deny that he enjoyed the thrill of combat.
I was watching an episode of Generation Kill where the character of “Poke” Espera (?) states that one thing that’s not overrated is combat. That quote wasn’t in the book, but the platoon Evan Wright was embedded with was consulted about the making of the miniseries and one of the platoon members portrayed himself.
I think combat appeals to the type of people who volunteer for Special Forces or other elite combat units in an adrenaline junkie kind of way. But what do I know; I don’t even like roller coasters.
Rob
I don’t really think most soldiers on the front line in professional armies are thrilled with war, nor conscripts either. I’ll stick to a very generic definition of ‘military’ to mean the institution, not the individuals.
Defense contractors like wars-it generates demand for their products. Do soldiers like it? I doubt it-unless you are a psychopathically inclined person.
You’re assuming they profit from it. A bombed factory wipes out an awful lot of profits. And that they don’t profit more from an armed peace. Of course, they do profit from other peoples’ wars.
Of course, America wasn’t bombed in WW1 or WW2 or Korea or Vietnam. It won’t be out of range in WW3.
Winston Churchill certainly liked war, in a self-promoting way, though he was all for declaring war on the Soviet Union after Germany and Japan were defeated in WW2.
Adrian Carton de Wiart definitely loved war.
I think a lot of people are fascinated with the idea of war and combat. Many young men would like to test themsleves in that way, in theory anyway. I think a lot of people love the honor and glory idea of war until they actually find out it isn’t that way. Every generation has to relearn that war is not glorious.
Almost all of us in the USA, or so it seems, love the idea of having the most kick-ass military in the world and we don’t mind imagining situations where we use that overwhelming force to “fix” what is wrong around the world. Is that loving war or is it just being helpful? I don’t know but we sure do love the idea.
I do know there is now a culture of loving the military in the USA. We pretend the military is just there to defend us from those evil people who want to take over our country but that is only believable to those who never look at the overwhelming size of our forces.
Well yeah, the losers are never thrilled with the idea in the end.
The people I knew that lived on base at Ft. Carson in Colorado Springs, couldn’t wait to pull the trigger on someone. A 19 year old kid, who’s fresh out of boot camp and seemingly invincible might change his/her mind when someone is shooting back though.
It’s easy to love war if it’s not your own ass on the line. Governments and rulers enjoy it like chess as long as they aren’t personally at risk.
They hardly enjoy it except maybe for people like Saddam Hussein or Kaiser Wilhelm II:.
Famine and Death are close friends, but he never got on well with Pestilence.
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter. - Ernest Hemingway
There are some religious groups that believe that dying in battle results in rewards in the next life. So I can see that a follower of one of those faiths could be said to be eager to go to battle. The fact that they believe in a future life kind of takes the sting out of potentially dying in the process, and the chance for reward could make it appealing.
I"m not so sure that washes, Qin, unless you are adhering to an exceptionally narrow definition of the term “enjoy”. Wars are certainly good for certain governmental styles and can provide an excellent distraction to internal issues. They can generate money in ways that are not obvious to the public, and allow a great deal of legislation to pass that would be far more ethically suspect in peacetime. If war truly was viewed as the last and worst resort of the desperate, we would not be pursuing such a long and convoluted agenda. We would instead be using all available options to preserve life and destroy targets as precisely and decisively as possible. Troops on the ground would be the last resort, not the first. That does not reflect my time in the USAF in the early 2000’s. We were trained quite extensively in a mindset that dehumanized the enemy combatant. Now while such tactics might be necessary to the formation of a solid force that is loyal to itself and effective, it is NOT the action of the Ethical High Ground. It is the action of efficiency, of a machine whose purpose is to Win At All Costs. It’s Profit. Of a different sort than you might be used to, but Profit all the same. Lives are cheaper than missiles, So it’s off to glorious war.
IANAShrink, but from what I’ve heard some cases of PTSD involve soldiers going nuts once their service is over, not so much because they relive traumatic events or the deaths of their mates and so forth, but because a) civilian life doesn’t provide them with the high adrenaline thrills of combat and b) their coming to realize that they actually *enjoyed *the fighting and the bombing and the killing, even though society and our culture has taught them that it was a Bad Thing they were nevertheless doing out of duty and sacrifice and all that good shit.
Some others get off on getting to do things that, in “normal” life, would get them locked up. For those, it’s not so much the killing (or the raping, or the blowing shit up, or the thieving, sorry, scrounging/liberating materials/denying the enemy resources) that matters, it’s doing forbidden things and getting away with them. Again, once they come back home and down from the war, the realization of this can cause psych troubles.
So yeah, some people do like war. And it’s still no fun at all for them. People can be fucked up some 
I think both Bushes got a kick out of it as long as things were going well. Human nature has some dark facets.
Klingons and Vikings, sure. Not too many of either of those around. Anyone today?