If he had said the reverse, that they would never be satisfied because they were Christian, or even Muslim, would the officer still be a battalion commander in Iraq? It also serves as an unpleasant reminder of why religion and the military are so closely knit, and in fact, may give some insight into the very origin of religion as a means of protecting and spreading a culture. If the soldier believes that they're fighting and risking their life for God (and not merely as a pawn in the oil-game) and that even if they were to die, they would go to heaven, one would expect them to: 1. be more willing to fight, 2. be less afraid of death, 3. be less concerned with the people they're killing (after all, god hates them), 4. be less concerned with the death of their comrades (they're going to heaven), 5. in the event they do die it won't hurt their recruiting efforts because they've gone to heaven, and they shouldn't have to worry about anyone butting their nose into any of the deaths because to do so would be on par with muddling in god's affairs. Unless of course you're dealing with an atheist which, as we've seen, just screws everything up.
This actually raises an interesting question: can a major military exist without integrating a religious ideology? The obvious counters to this theory are Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Pol Pot, but the ideologies of these regimes were atheistic only from a judeo-christian perspective. Objectively they were as mythological as any religion, they merely replaced god with the head of the state. There is little difference between them and the government of North Korea, except that Kim Jong Il and his father are explicitly referred to as gods.
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