Yeah, the title spells it out perfectly. The only other function for the eternal war is to serve as an distraction from internal problems (but that's more of a bonus on top of the spending).

Google “who won the Vietnam War” and prepare for nuclear levels of copium.

Well the PAVN did win the war, but Vietnam was forced to abandon revolutionary society and enter the capitalist dominated world economy of privatization, free trade, debt, commodity/labor export, and resource extraction, so American capitalism did win in the end even if they lost the war. Not to mention the billions made for defense contractors.

Vietnam is a part of 15 Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). This is opening markets like South Korea where, more than seven years after implementing the VKFTA, Vietnam has become the third largest mango supply market for S. Korea, reaching 1.7 thousand tons. This is equal to US$7.4 million.

As a result of the EVFTA that is now in place, Vietnam has also become the largest source of cashew nuts for the EU. In the first 10 months of 2022, Vietnam exported 98.97 thousand tons of cashews to European markets, worth US$699 million. This represents an increase of 9.8 percent over the same period in 2021.

[…] There are, however, a number of government incentives supporting the agricultural sector, as well as FTAs, that, though a challenge in many ways, are also opening up foreign markets to Vietnamese agricultural products.

Src: https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/vietnam-agricultural-products.html/

While foreign companies are not allowed to directly own land in Vietnam (they must pay rent) it seems there’s a lot of foreign participation in the agricultural center (cited from the same article):

Three firms that have been relatively successful in the Vietnamese market are Cargill, Olam, and the Louis Dreyfus Company

Now as expected these “free trade” agreements and foreign corps contribute to the exploitation of workers, including children:

The last official survey to assess child labour in Vietnam was undertaken in 2018 with the Second National Child Labour Survey. The survey found that more than 1 million children aged between 5-17 were engaged in child labour and it is estimated that over 50 percent of those children were working in the agricultural, forestry, and fishery sectors

[…] As part of the assessment, we spoke to a range of people involved in the pepper harvest and visited the plantations first-hand. During this trip we met Y.D.A, an 11-year-old boy from an ethnic minority group who was working on the plantations with his parents and had never been to school. In many ways, Y.D.A. became a symbol of the unknown numbers of children in rural Vietnam who too were out of school due to poverty, working and making “invisible” contributions to an international company’s supply chain.

src: https://www.childrights-business.org/impact/child-labour-in-vietnam-s-agriculture-sector-the-story-of-one-boy-in-vietnam-the-fate-of-millions-of-children-worldwide.html

So yeah let’s stop pretending the world situation is still 1976, vietnam is a still imperialised country with a long way to go in the process of national soverignty, anti imperialism, workers’ rights, education, and socialism.

E; Just had a further thought that the Vietnamese victory in their wars of liberation is more comparable to the British leaving India than say, the establishment of USSR

Korea, loss despite dropping more ordinance than WW2, destroying every structure in the country and killing 1 in 5 of the entire population

Vietnam, total loss

Afghanistan, total loss

Ukraine, losing to Yeltsin Jr.

Who did these wars benefit?

What's stupid about it? You haven't actually said anything. Which specific part do you disagree with? The consistently losing at everything part? Or are you really just quibbling over the definition of war?

What was the last time the US formally declared war?

Even on its own terms, the claim is wrong. We very clearly won the First Gulf War. We won in Kosovo. We flattened Grenada and Panama like pancakes. We won the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan easily, and dominated these countries for decades before the sheer cost of occupying such a remote territory ultimately removed us. We have occupied South Korea uncontested for 70 years and reduced North Korea to a hermit kingdom.

We pretty unequivocally won the Cold War.

The problem with all this "winning" is that it has come at the expense of our economic foundations. Or academic sector is crumbling. Our health care sector is three insurance companies in a lab coat. Our transportation and energy infrastructure is 50 years out of date. All that so we can throw trillions into a bloody mess on the frontier that we get to pretend means we're a Superpower.

People tend to consider war a “real one” when your country is attacked and you respond, not when a small island is doing something popular with the citizens but you dislike, so you go and drop herbicide on their forests and brag about massacring 20% of the country.

We can use three definitions of "real war" here.

1: A war that the US government has declared to be a war. Which has not happened since ww2. Officially the US has not even been in a war since ww2.

2: A war against an enemy "near parity", the thing the US government keeps putting enormous money into getting ready to fight. Which also hasn't happened since ww2.

3: A military conflict against a functioning state using conventional military means. Which makes Iraq the last "real war" and before that it was... the Yugoslav wars, kinda?

It's a bad standard and makes the US look kind of bumbling and incompetent. In reality the US has used its military capacity to participate in and bankroll countless undeclared dirty wars, violent anti-democratic coups, and to facilitate violent far-right terrorism as well as drug and human trafficking.

Most of these conflicts are excluded from American curricula and the ones that are included are largely just sob storied for the few thousand dead Americans with maybe a sentence or two for their millions of victims.