There is indeed a good reason for Obama expanding the war machine exponentially: war profiteering is big business. A president who is friendly to big business interests can be expected to be awarded with large donations to his/her campaign coffers when next he/she runs for office, and a lucrative consultancy position in the corporation's lobbying firm after leaving office.

A never-ending, perpetual war allows the executive office to be more powerful than it would be otherwise, and grants the administration plenty of rationales to demand increased power and chip away at the civil rights the common citizens hold in our nominal democracy-within-a-plutocracy. It provides justification for creating special classes of people who are exempt from constitutional protections--such as due process--and can get away with this by creating an enemy whom the administration can successfully dehumanize to facilitate those rationales.

Perhaps most importantly, wartime is not only when our civil rights are most jeopardized, but it's also a time when patriotism and national vanity are at their highest level, and at no other time can the executive branch of the government gain such a high degree of complicity from the general public with the incremental erosion of their civil rights.

Throw a series of severe economic recessions and other crises into the mix, and you can see how beneficial the concept of a never-ending war works for the present system, and why when the Cold War ended, the "war on terror" was necessary to take its place as a war without end to continue our government's hugely bloated spending on the Pentagon.