As for people, spending a couple of years in the military is much better personal development for many young people than going to college at an age when most people can't appreciate it.
These things aside, of course the loss of life is horrific and a terrible waste.
https://facethefactsusa.org/facts/the-true-price-of-war-in-h...
Metal is a non-renewable resource. Cost of extraction does not match market price, more so when unnecessary demand is created for wars. What kind of spin is this?
"We can't have a metal shortage because there's lots of metal in space" is not the most coherent argument I've heard today...
There could be asteroids of pure palladium, platinum, gold, and silver, and it wouldn't matter a fig until it was cost competitive with digging rocks out of the ground, sticking them on a slow barge to a massive refinery and processing them with cheap, probably exploitative, labor.
But in general metals can be recycled quite well and often are recycled due to their price. Also even if you finely shredded it and mixed it with other stuff the resulting mix would still most likely have higher grade than regular ore & mining it would thus be economicaly viable.
Yeah, and see what mess that sort of thinking has got us into. Economic growth is worthless if it’s not sustainable.