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It is God's War
Mar 08, 2026
The bombs were still falling on Tehran when a U.S. commander looked his soldiers in the eye and told them why they were really there.
It's been less than two weeks since the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iran- killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and setting the Middle East on fire. The official reasons are familiar by now: nuclear proliferation, national security, regime change dressed up in the language of peace. But inside at least one military briefing room on the morning of March 2nd, the stated reason was something else entirely.
That sentence, reported by independent journalist Jonathan Larsen and submitted to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, didn't come from a street preacher or some fringe podcast you listen to on your way home from work. It came directly from a commanding officer. At a combat readiness briefing, to the people we are asking to fight and possibly die.
The NCO who filed the complaint wrote on behalf of fifteen other troops. Of those sixteen people, eleven are Christian. One is Muslim. One is Jewish.
The complaint email as published by journalist Jonathan Larsen and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The sender's identity has been withheld to protect them from Pentagon retribution.
By the time Larsen published his piece, the MRFF had logged more than 110 similar complaints, a number that would later surpass 200, from more than 40 units across at least 30 military installations, spanning every branch of service. These weren't isolated incidents. They were a pattern.
The complaints describe commanders urging soldiers not to be afraid, telling them this was "all part of God's divine plan," and pulling chapter and verse from the Book of Revelation. Armageddon. The Second Coming. The return of Christ. This is the frame being placed around a live shooting war where American service members are dying.
One NCO described the moment with a detail I can't stop thinking about: the commander "had a big grin on his face when he said all of this." That grin is what keeps me up. Not the theology, people believe what they believe, but the grin. The glee of someone who thinks the apocalypse is finally here and they've got front-row seats.
None of this happened in a vacuum.
Since May 2025, Pete Hegseth has been holding monthly Christian prayer services inside the Pentagon during working hours, broadcast on the building's internal network, with the DOD seal on the program. At the first one, his personal pastor prayed that Trump had been "sovereignly appointed" by God. At a press briefing on March 2nd- the same day as that readiness briefing- Hegseth described Iran as "hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions." And about ten days before the strikes began, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee sat down with Tucker Carlson and, when asked whether Israel had a biblical right to land spanning from the Nile to the Euphrates, said: "It would be fine if they took it all."
This is the rhetorical environment our military is operating in. When the people at the top talk like this publicly, what exactly do we expect from commanders down the chain?
Snopes left the claim unrated, noting that no audio or video exists and the Defense Department hasn't responded to requests for comment. That's responsible journalism, and I want to be honest about what we know and don't: we have anonymous complaints, a credible watchdog organization, and a pattern of corroboration across more than 200 people from dozens of units. We don't have a confession.
But here's the thing about anonymous sourcing in a military context: these NCOs are anonymous because they're afraid. Afraid of retribution from the very commanders they're reporting. That fear is itself the story. You don't file a complaint like this, carefully worded, lodged with an outside organization, speaking for sixteen people from three different faiths- as some casual act of political performance. You do it because something happened that shocked you. Because you felt like you had no other choice.
The complaint says these remarks "destroy morale and unit cohesion and are in violation of the oaths we swore to support the Constitution." That language is deliberate. These are people who know exactly what they signed up for, and what they didn't.
I keep coming back to a question without a clean answer: What does it do to a person to be told that the war they're fighting is the last war? That it's not about strategy or policy or even survival…but prophecy? That the bombs and the blood and the bodies are just stage-setting for something that's been written since the beginning of time?
I think about the Muslim soldier in that room. The Jewish one. I think about what it must have felt like to sit through that briefing and hear that the God of their commanding officer, the man with authority over their life in a combat zone, has chosen this moment, this war, and this president to end the world.
That's not a morale-booster. That's a threat wearing a sermon.
The MRFF's founder, Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force officer, called it "a national security threat- not just to our country, but to the world." He described the flood of complaints as the "unrestricted euphoria" of commanders who believe they're watching biblical prophecy unfold in real time.
Euphoria. In a war zone. About the end of the world.
If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.
The bombs are still falling. The complaints keep coming in. And somewhere, right now, there may be a commander standing in front of a roomful of soldiers- some of whom will ship out tomorrow- telling them that God chose this moment, this president, and this war.
And grinning.
Sources: Jonathan Larsen / Substack; Military Religious Freedom Foundation; Snopes; Military.com; Newsweek; Al Jazeera
