I will back up one step and start at the beginning. War is always the same and it is based in human psychology, but it goes back farther than politics. I define war as deadly or potentially deadly organized violence committed by a subset of one group, whose actions are morally sanctioned by that group, against a discrete and identifiable other group with a specific objective or goal.
Now, the key at this point is that war, having its foundation in human nature, it has to have a purpose in human development. Since intergroup conflict, or primitive war, was a normal activity for humans in our ancient past (or among the surviving hunter-gatherers), what was their motivation? As it turns out, it was their basic need to survive and reproduce. Conflicts were the result of territorial incursions, retaliation for attacks, and to take women. Other humans invading your territory meant reducing the natural resources your group has to survive on. Letting an attack go unaddressed meant that your group was easy prey. Women were needed to bear children and war tended to be a male dominated activity. At a very basic level, it was the need to survive and reproduce that drove conflict.
It makes sense that human needs were the drive behind human warfare. Human needs motivate human activity . Satisfying needs is necessary for human existence. War was an adapted strategy for humans. “A number of distinct, but overlapping evolutionary approaches to understanding collective violence (with a particular focus on war) have been developed in the last two decades. These approaches share a common assumption that warfare has been selected for in human evolutionary history, although they differ in terms of the hypothesized evolutionary function, and particular evolutionary trajectory of collective violence (citations omitted).” It is reasonable to assume that an adaptive strategy must somehow enhance survival. Therefore it makes perfect sense that a social animal would engage in a societal version of conflict to defend what they need to survive or even take from others the necessities of life if the opportunity presents.
So, war will not be about money, but it can be for power. It can be about anything that is a basic need - survival, reproduction, security, self-esteem, self-expression, autonomy. These are what we go to war over. So however you characterize it, its source needs to be found here. Also, war, as conducted by tribal groups, is a sanctioned activity. Crime is not.
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