Politics & Power Quote by Joseph Sobran

Sobran’s line works because it steals the language of domestic policy and smuggles it onto the battlefield. Calling war “one more big government program” isn’t just a cheap jab at bureaucracy; it’s a deliberate reframing meant to puncture the romance of national security. The phrase “just one more” does the real damage: it strips war of its supposed exceptionalism and drops it into the same category as costly, permanent, self-perpetuating state projects that rarely sunset once the money starts flowing.

The subtext is a classic anti-statist suspicion: war doesn’t merely require government power, it feeds it. Budgets expand, secrecy thickens, agencies proliferate, contractors metastasize, and the public gets trained to accept emergency rules as normal. A “program” suggests managers, stakeholders, metrics, and institutional inertia; in that sense, Sobran implies that war becomes less a last resort than a reliable mechanism for centralization. The moral horror of violence is translated into the chilly grammar of procurement and appropriations, which is precisely the point.

Contextually, Sobran came out of the American conservative-libertarian dissent that grew sharper during the Cold War’s national security state and then found new fuel in post-9/11 militarization. He’s aiming at an audience primed to distrust “big government,” then forcing them to recognize that the biggest government is often the one wearing a uniform. It’s a slogan with teeth: anti-war rhetoric recoded in the dialect of fiscal politics.