> It is almost universally true that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time Strictly speaking, you don't need to redistribute wealth to lower inequality. Destroying wealth is sufficient. Violence and war is pretty good at that.
War does not seem to destroy wealth, but redistribute it?
Wealth used to be food, livestock, people (because they can make food and manage livestock), and things generally coveted by all, like jewelry. It was easy to imagine how going to war might increase one's wealth; you simply take their food, livestock, jewelry, and enslave their people. You have to whack their warrior class to do it, but beyond that, conquest was a pretty good deal.
Nowadays, actual physical conquest is not that useful for wealth acquisition. Bombing a skyscraper does not give you a skyscraper; it gives you an enormous mess to clean up. Too much modern wealth is in people's heads, or immobile infrastructure, or even just embedded in the ambient relationships between companies and people. A lot of that wealth is so fragile that it can be destroyed by a bad tax policy or poorly-conceived regulation, to say nothing of being literally bombed.
Modern wars are still about wealth, of course... it's just a lot more subtle than it used to be, and no longer has much to do with redistribution. Now it's about suppressing a rival, or enforcing your economic will on another country (like what appears to be our current war in the middle east because we wanted a pipeline to go here instead of there, which has since spiraled out of control), but to a large degree even these actions are the exceptions. A lot of what used to be armed conflict now happens in treaty negotiations and diplomacy, threats of embargo and threats of tariff, negotiations in the UN, stuff like that.
So it depends on your point of view. The really old ideas of war, that involve actually violence, is generally wealth destructive. If a war is going to stimulate an economy, it's going to be a subtle sort of economic stimulus from producing real goods and providing an impetus to reorganize the economy, not because of the spoils of war, which are all but useless in the modern era. But if you look at war in the broader sense, it has been almost entirely about redistribution, albeit mostly of future wealth (since current wealth is generally too expensive to move around). For instance, you don't really understand modern international climate negotiations if you think it is truly just about "climate"; it may be about that, but it is also a battle on the redistributive battleground.