Answer: How to package a WAR as a .deb

The best answer that I obtained off-list is an ant task that's sitting here: http://code.google.com/p/ant-deb-task/ If you know ant, it's trivially simple, you just say in some XML arguments "put these files there", set some attributes like maintainer address etc. and you are done.

Re: How to package a WAR as a .deb

Something I found helpful for getting started was javahelper. It contains a tool called jh_makepkg that will create a debian directory with all the necessary files for you. It makes a java library rather than a war, so you'd still have to customize your build a little or use the ant script option