I don't believe that a principal motivation for warmaking by U.S. political leaders was the influence of weapons manufacturers. Eisenhower literally warned the country about that in his farewell address. (For those who don't remember, he coined the phrase "military industrial complex.") Initially, U.S. politicians, including Eisenhower and Johnson, sincerely believed that they were combating a communist threat to the U.S. national interest. Many people thought this was nonsensical, but they were in a minority. The United States propped up brutal dictators all over the world in fear that their countries would otherwise go commie. But whether an impoverished faraway land had a nominally communist government was, and is, no threat to U.S. national security. The entire world view was essentially delusional.
But, it is true that the military-industrial complex is a fact that greatly distorts our national priorities. The U.S. had an enormously expensive and powerful military, and there was naturally a tendency to try to find something to do with it. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, as the saying goes. But the fact is that the communists' strongest selling point in Vietnam was the presence of the U.S. military, which bombed and shot and burned indiscriminately, and sometimes massacred civilians for sport. The South Vietnamese puppet government had no legitimacy whatever, so the people had nowhere else to turn. The U.S. dropped more tonnage of bombs on the small, impoverished country of Vietnam than all the powers dropped in all of WWII, and that is no way to make friends.
I would add that one of the most striking developments in the Vietnam war was the deterioration of the U.S. army. By 1969 or so it was disintegrating, with widespread heroin use by the enlisted men and drunkenness by the officers. Enlisted men commonly murdered their officers, and refused to fight. They were a conscript army, that saw no purpose in the war and had nothing to fight for. The same problem afflicts the Russian army in Ukraine.
And just to forestall any questions or comments, in the year I turned 18 the U.S. was reducing its troop count in Vietnam and the draft was winding down. In case you're too young to know, there was a draft lottery based on your birthday. I had a high number and they only took up to about 10 if I remember correctly. They no longer handed out college deferments so I would have had a difficult choice to make otherwise, but I never had to. Unlike draft dodgers Donald Trump and George W. Bush.
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Of course, the decision was actually a very easy one for George W. Bush, and for Donald Shitler, and for Darth Cheney--who made the decision five times. It was easy because they understood from their families that going off to die in wars is for poor people, not them. The fix is always in for them.
They need to be around to make money for their families and their families' friends.
Here's Shitler, lying about the supposed "sacrifices" he's made, when in fact he hasn't, because he's never worked hard in his life:
"I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I've done, I've had tremendous success. I think I've done a lot," he said.
The truth is that he's stiffed people, not paid his bills, raped women, taken a full-page ad in the New York Times to condemn brown people for crimes they never committed and call for their deaths, played golf, thrown his meals at walls for other people to clean up--and lied pathologically in his sick narcissism to make himself look like someone who's admirable, when in point of fact, he is only tragic.
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