Heinlein pretty much posits that all wars are a matter of population growth and limited resources.
This is so weirdly Malthusian, particularly coming from a technological optimist like Heinlein, that I never bought into it.
Heinlein tries to pretty up various completely irrational ideas as to why people fight to make it seem inevitable, but the only one that made sense to me was at the individual level. The rest amounted to, "Eventually we will meet something that wants to fight us, and we'd better be ready"--the H&MP instructor says almost exactly that at some point. And we will meet something that wants to fight us because "that's the way the world is."
A point often lost on people is that memes share the same Malthusian crunch as biological creatures. In fact, memes may face a stronger crunch. Technological advances may keep us feeding larger populations, for a while anyway... but nothing will create sufficient brains for the memes to populate without "meme wars".
Some memes engage in "limited warfare", accept their losses gracefully, and fade off the scene. Some drive their hosts to fight to the death and try to convert as many others as possible. Guess which type of meme tends to survive longer in the human population?
If this sounds academic to you, open a history book. "Why don't we all just get along" sounds great in theory, and is certainly the purely rational-economic point of view. But when asked to convert to Islam, or get baptized, or pay taxes to a government overseas, or some other "meme only" change that has little or no physical effect on you... People are most emphatically not pure rational-economic machines. People have culture (memes) and a little thing such as forbidding/allowing/forcing girls to wear a veil to school causes them to react "irrationally".
And this doesn't even go into the fact that, when all is said and done, Maltus was right on the money. Advancing technology aside, if the human race continues to grow exponentially, very quickly (in a millenium or two) you reach absurdities. Asimov calculated that if we double the number of people every 30-40 years, the total mass of humans will equal the total time of the universe - before the year 7000. Even if we double the number of people every 100 years instead of 30, it takes an alarmingly short time for people to eat the whole of the earth (molten core and all).
At some point, the number of deaths must balance the number of births. Sure, rich countries are getting close to that point, but the western world as a rule is not there yet, and its doubtful it ever will be. You also have a problem with the poor-but-developing countries who have access to modern medicine and are making babies like crazy. If people are willing to react violently to the amount and placement of fabric on school girls, you can imagine how they'll react when not/having babies comes into play. You'll be fighting the Catholics and the Muslims at the same time. And that's just for starters.
Finally, in the 10,000 years of documented history of this planet, there hasn't been a single one AFAIK when there wasn't some war going on somewhere. This seems a pretty strong indication that war isn't going anywhere. The meme "why don't we all just get along" just isn't working that well, and saying that it will some day take over the world takes a whole lot more justification than "Maltus was wrong because of the last 400 years". First, we had plenty of the most nasty imaginable wars in the last 400 years, and second, they were extremely atypical.
Heinlein was a technological optimist but he was no fool either. If anything, his explanation for the war seems much more realistic than Haldeman's. In Heinlein's universe, humans and "bugs" and other races could live on the same planets, and assuming such planets are in very finite supply, you have all the makings of a nasty war. Also, Heinlein makes some philosophical points there about why people would choose to become soldiers, and why would a society encourage or even be built on this (as many have in human history), which are worth thinking about (whether you agree or not).
Haldeman's humans and aliens started fighting for no good reasons ("a ship was lost to an accident, an alien ship happened to be around, and some generals polished their medals and declared war" - yeah, right) and then stopped for no good reason ("it is a clone thing"). His soldiers are either conscripted or grown for the job (no choice involved) and are completely divorced from the society (this is in fact a main theme of the book). The whole thing is so weak that the only consistent reading of it is that the protagonist doesn't get to know the reasons behind the war started or stopping. He's just a pawn with no choice; what's more, he never in the whole book stops to think about it - not ever! Heinlein's protagonist spends most of the book thinking about how and why he got to be where he is!
That said, both authors did a great job describing an individual-caught-in-a-war point of view. Granted this point of view is different - Heinlein's is "What is good about being a Marine in WWII" (and they were all volunteers to the corp) and Haldeman's is "What is bad about being Infantry in Vietnam" (minus the "this is a stupid politician war" bitching that draftees were certain to share). But both do a great job at it, and are definitely worth reading.