There have been attempts to rewrite world history based on statistics of how many young man to "burn" there were in a society at a given time – and it works out greatly. While I do admit that this isn't of that importance in modern societies, I would still maintain that the patterns are still to be observed. Also, war has been one of the first means of making a fortune, with trade becoming another one only in the 18th century or so. Still, we may observe some inheritance here, by the emphasis on the risks involved to justify the wins. (Read Jane Austen's "Persuasion" as a sociological study on the matter and you'll see how the British upper- and middle classes would have imploded under the pressure of second sons around 1800, if there hadn't been the Navy and the Army as means of making a fortune and becoming eligible for marriage. Even more true for the lower classes, but there's no much writing on this.)

As a sidenote, we may observe that the US has undergone some efforts and investments in the past decades to decouple its war force from this logic by the means of technology.