Celphi, I'm just going to say you haven't played this game sufficiently long (> 2 years) and/or participated in multiple wars (especially clan wars) to comment on warring vs netting. The ideology in how you run your country is completely different.

A warring country focuses on warfare, weapons, strategy and SDI techs. These techs don't boost your income. It also focuses on a decent amount of tanks and troops, and high SPAL.

A netting country focuses on Res/Bus and their main tech (farmer - agri, indy - indy), and minimally some strat/weapons, and a nominal amount of spies for spying targets to grab. A netting country runs no tanks and troops, their upkeep to attack/defense ratio is off the charts compared to jets and turrets.

The way a country is built and played is different. A netting Commie with no SDI will always lose to a war prepared Dict with a large number of missiles and spies, even if the Commie has twice as much production initially. A netting country doesn't have SDI. A country might get some SDI if it thinks it might get into a war, but in this scenario, it isn't an ideal netting situation anymore, it's in the middle.