I don't know exactly what the poster meant by "these people", but my own experience having worked at a defense contractor was that the facility I was at (which designed and made missles), all of the managers were upset that there wasn't presently a war going on. I suspect that the past few years have been better for morale there.
Every day they would have meetings going over global hot spots and assess whether there was any chance that the U.S. would have to intervene, and therefore purchase more armaments from them. This was not an objective, collective discussion, but a pleading.
I found that at least at that particular company, by and large, "these kind of people" were shitbags.
I will say, that contrasted with work I've done with other defense contractors in the ensuing years, they are not all uniform.
Strange, since most of the US big money spending is mostly unrelated to the wars. They didn't start the F-22 when the war in Iraq broke out, the new aircraft carriers are rolling out to replace ones that are getting old, not ones that got sunk ... etc.
That's less true of "perishable" items like munitions.
Generally, the US Government has a set stockpile (which may increase or decrease based on policy changes, but is usually static).
This company made guided missiles (very expensive, medium to long range), and needed the existing stockpile to be depleted (which is a nice way of saying that they needed things to be blown up).
Other divisions of the company I'm sure were working on different kinds of projects, the contracts for which weren't as contingent on being in a skirmish.
There's a difference between having a contract to develop and design an F-22 (which thankfully occurs before they are needed in warfare) and to actually build replacement F-22's (such as when they are shot down).
If this is Israel, I believe the OP means right-wing pro-settlement ex-military. And by ex-military, I mean they served in combat units and likely went on to become officers and stayed on after their 3-year mandatory service term was up.
These kind of projects would be military equipment (weapons, trucks, armors) efficiency, troops efficiency (either training techniques or planning algorithms/strategies) and other retarded stuff like that.
