Letting lobbyists for military contractors like William Cohen opine as if they are objective experts, that’s how.
I don’t watch a lot of cable news, mostly because it just makes me agitated. At night, most of the coverage isn’t really news but opinion and entertainment delivered as news. So instead of learning from people who actually know something about the events being covered, the cable programs center on anchors who are mostly skilled at emoting, building a connection with their viewers, and guests who help narrate whatever spectacle we are being offered to draw our attention. (Well, maybe Chris Hayes is an exception.)
But cable news still has a big impact on public opinion, because the people who watch think they’re well informed, and they influence their friends and colleagues are influenced. So even if the viewing audience for CNN, MSNBC and FOX is only around six million people total at the height of prime time, what those programs emphasize has outsize influence on public opinion.
A few nights ago, I looked at CNN for a few minutes and caught Jake Tapper, standing in the 4:00am dark somewhere in Ukraine, interviewing William Cohen, the former US Secretary of Defense. Cohen is certainly the kind of knowledgeable talking head you’d want to hear from in the middle of the Ukraine crisis, so I listened for a bit. Cohen was arguing that it was time for the United States and NATO to escalate their efforts to defend Ukraine and that it was time to stop letting our fear of tripping into a shooting war with Russia keep us from taking more aggressive steps. Russia isn’t abiding by any rules, while we are, he complained. It’s time for the US and NATO to stop letting Russia push us around, he intimated.
Cohen is on TV a lot these days, and he’s not the person being moved by the news of the horrible atrocities being carried out by Russian forces. No sensible person thinks it’s a good idea to led Vladimir Putin invade another sovereign country, commit war crimes, and get off scot-free. But there are also good reasons for us to be extraordinarily cautious about directly confronting Russian forces with the full power available to NATO. As I’ve written here earlier, under Putin Russia has embraced a military doctrine called “escalate to de-escalate” and would use low-yield nuclear weapons to try to push its adversaries into an abrupt half if its leadership believes the security of Russia itself was endangered. None of us know where Putin sees that line, but backing him into a corner where he sees no other way out is not wise.
As I listened to Cohen make his case, I wondered, what does he do for a living? The last time he served in government was from 1997–2001, he was Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary and the token Republican moderate in an otherwise Democratic administration. His Wikipedia entry describes him as an “American politician, lawyer and author.” It’s only when you scroll down to the “recent years” section of his biography that you learn that in 2001, he founded a lobbying firm called The Cohen Group, along with three other former Pentagon colleagues. What does the Cohen Group do? Its website is vague: “The Cohen Group provides global business consulting services and advice on tactical and strategic opportunities in virtually every market.”
You have to dig further to really know how Cohen makes his living. Deep on its website, its Aerospace and Defense practice group declares, “The Cohen Group (TCG) assists aerospace and defense firms on policy, business development and transactions. We have helped firms from the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Turkey, Israel, GCC, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan to succeed in North America, Europe, the Middle East, India, Latin America, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. TCG has assisted clients to compete for and win tens of billions of dollars in contracts, to enter new international markets, to build joint venture and other partnerships overseas, and to move up the supply chain.” It’s the only section of the company’s site that refers to big money, in the form of “tens of billions in contracts” won for its clients.
Who are The Cohen Group’s clients? Its website doesn’t say. The only window we have on what this shadowy lobbying firm actually does is the public financial disclosure reports that some of its employees have been required to file when they’ve taken jobs in the executive branch. Thus we can learn that Nicholas Burns, who was made US Ambassador to China by President Biden, worked as a “senior counselor” for The Cohen Group from 2009 to 2021, earning $415,000 in consulting fees while there assisting clients that included General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Honeywell — the three giant military contractors that are at the heart of the “defense industrial base” of the United States.
Helping defense contractors keep feasting on the public treasury has been very lucrative for William Cohen. According to a 2006 Washington Post profile, the former baker’s son from Bangor, Maine was never wealthy before he left government service. His final public disclosure filing from 2001 showed tens of thousands of charge-account debts owed at interest rates as high as 25%. But, “Within weeks of leaving office, he was living in a $3.5 million McLean mansion with a swimming pool, a cabana and a carriage house.”
One fun thing about that 2006 profile is when it describes how a client of Cohen’s, Raydon Corp, which makes training simulators for the military, came to hire the firm. Don Ariel, its CEO, was looking for help marketing his products “when saw Cohen on CNN and called him.” Cohen’s team helped get Raydon meetings demoing its product on Capitol Hill, leading to millions of dollars for the equipment in 2005 defense appropriations. “There is a reason that they hire Hollywood stars to shill various pieces of equipment or products,” Ariel told the Post. “And certainly somebody with the name recognition of a Bill Cohen . . . there is instant brand recognition and credibility that comes along with that.” Raydon paid Cohen’s firm $625,000 in lobbying fees for its services.
William Cohen is not the only former Pentagon official to cash in on his service to his country. Nor is he the first ex-military official to go on TV promoting war. A whole platoon of war hawks who helped sell George W. Bush’s idiotic decision to invade Iraq. And a 2008 investigation by the New York Times found that the Pentagon had a sophisticated multi-year effort aimed as massaging American public opinion by providing ex-military official appearing on TV news shows with in-depth briefings and talking points. The Times found that “Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as ‘message force multipliers’ or ‘surrogates’ who could be counted on to deliver administration ‘themes and messages’ to millions of Americans ‘in the form of their own opinions.’”
So the next time you see William Cohen or any of his ilk on cable TV opining about the war in Ukraine, or China, or any other international conflict, remember: He’s not just talking for himself as an ex-government official who knows something about the defense sector. He’s in the business of selling weapons, and nothing is as good for that business as war.