Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private individuals.

Taken at face value, the line reads as a deliberately provocative piece of satire: it pushes the logic of privatization to an absurd extreme by applying it to war. The implied critique is that war, when treated as a “field” with stakeholders, incentives, and profit, becomes morally inverted—something people might pursue for private gain rather than public necessity. In Heller’s typical antiwar, bureaucratic-irony mode, the statement also hints that governments can sanitize or legitimize violence through official structures; by “leaving” war to private individuals, the ugliness and criminality of organized killing would be harder to disguise as policy. The shock value is part of the argument.