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Azathoth123 comments on Rationality Quotes August 2014 - Less Wrong
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Not necessarily. Muslims, in particular, have a history of using slave soldiers to good effect.
You do realize it's possible to convert to fundamentalist Islam?
I seem to recall, and a glance over the Wikipedia articles suggests, that the Mamluk and Janissary systems involved raising (enslaved) boys into a military environment from a fairly young age. These boys might come from subjugated territories, but they'd in effect have been part of the dominant culture for much of their lives: it's not a system that could be used to quickly convert conquered territories into additional manpower.
That said, it hasn't been unusual for empires, modern and otherwise, to make substantial use of auxiliary forces drawn from client states. The Roman military probably relied on them as much as they did on the legions, or more in the late empire.
The late Roman Empire wasn't exactly successful at conquering anything, or even at keeping the Empire from falling apart.
Yes, but requiring that soldiers do so makes the process of conquest less optimized, since it's easier for obvious reasons to get soldiers without this requirement than with it. (The same goes for using slaves.)
You seem to be focusing solely on cost; the difference between benefit and cost is what matters, and the benefits of a fighting force with shared values (particularly shared religious ones) are many and obvious.
By that reasoning, it's the Romans and the Mongols who are un-optimized for conquest.
The Mongols had the advantage of recruiting from a pool of steppe nomads with similar values.
The Roman Republic conquered the Mediterranean basin with an army consisting of Italians that were required to adopt Roman values before joining. Later the Roman legion adopted the looser system you described. Subsequently Roman legions would spend nearly as much effort fighting other Roman legions in civil wars as fighting Rome's enemies.