Consider Phlebas

Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.

That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.

“Don’t you have a religion?” Dorolow asked Horza.

“Yes,” he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. “My survival.”