A war strategist’s checklist, borrowed for one of the hardest decisions an employee can make

Jeff Newman, Esq., MBA

Eliot A. Cohen has spent his career studying how nations decide to go to war and why they so often decide badly. He served as Counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice and is a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University. His new book, The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics, was published today by Princeton University Press.

In an adaptation published in The Atlantic, Cohen lays out seven questions every strategist must answer. They look simple. He argues they are rarely answered well. As Cohen writes in the article, adapted from his new book The Strategist, strategy “can be studied but rarely mastered.”

I read the article this morning. What struck me was not the war. It was how closely his seven questions track a decision I have watched people make for 46 years: whether to report fraud against the government.

Many of our clients are doctors and nurses. Not long ago, we represented a nurse practitioner who was as sharp a medical practitioner as I have known. Despite a chronic immune system illness, she worked every day, no matter how weak she felt. She loved her job and the people she treated, and in her spare time she read articles on the latest treatments for different diseases.

When she came to me about extensive fraudulent billing by her employer, a large provider, I described the whistleblower process and the rigors of preparing a case. She told me about her condition and how stress often caused her illness to flare up.

I asked her repeatedly whether she thought this was the right thing to do. Each time, she said it was not even a choice for her. She loved her profession and felt she needed to protect it.

In time, the government intervened, the company paid heavily, my client received a significant award, and the case drew extensive media coverage.

Judged by strategy alone, and thinking only of herself, the answer would have been to protect her health and stay out of it. Morally, she could not. To her, the right strategy was to reveal the company’s fraud.

A note on borrowing

Cohen is strict about the word strategy. As one early reviewer of the book observes, he reserves it for war and rejects broader uses. So I am not suggesting he would endorse what follows.

I am borrowing his questions because they are good questions, and because the decision to blow the whistle has more in common with going to war than most people would like. The stakes are high. The opponent usually has more money and more lawyers. The outcome is uncertain for years. And there is rarely a way back.

1. What else is going on?

Cohen’s first question is about context. No one fights in isolation; what others have already done shapes what you can do.

For a whistleblower, the most important part of that context is whether someone else has already come forward, or whether the fraud is already public. Both questions once came with hard rules. The law has changed, and the rules are softer than many people assume.

The first-to-file rule still bars a later related action while an earlier one is pending (31 U.S.C. § 3730(b)(5)). But it is not absolute. Courts generally ask whether the later complaint alleges the same essential facts of the same fraud. A case built on a different scheme or theory may proceed. And the Supreme Court has held that the bar applies only while the earlier case is still pending (Kellogg Brown & Root Services, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Carter, 2015).

The public disclosure bar changed even more. Since Congress amended the statute in 2010, a court dismisses a case because the fraud was already publicly disclosed only if the government does not oppose dismissal (§ 3730(e)(4)(A)). In practice, that decision now rests with the government.

Often there is no way to know, before a case is filed, whether someone else has already filed. If someone has, the Assistant U.S. Attorney will know, because they keep a database, and they will notify your counsel fairly early in the process.

Because of the first-to-file rule, once the process begins it needs to be pushed along as fast as possible. But the case must also be fully analyzed and vetted before filing. These are rigorous cases.

2. Who are those guys?

Cohen takes his second question from the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The two train robbers can count the posse chasing them and name its weapons. What they cannot work out is why it will not quit. Governments, Cohen argues, are good at counting tanks and poor at understanding the people who make the decisions.

Employees make the same mistake. They know how large the legal department is. They rarely ask the harder questions. Who at the company will actually decide how to respond? How has it treated people who raised concerns before? Does the head of compliance act independently, or report to the executive whose numbers depend on the conduct?

There is a second set of “those guys”: the government lawyers who will read the complaint. Their caseload, their office’s priorities and their experience with the industry all bear on what happens next.

3. What are we trying to do?

Cohen points out that war aims are political, and political aims tend to be vague, inconsistent and liable to change. He shows that even the four objectives of the 1990–91 Gulf War, often cited as a model of clarity, were less clear than they looked.

A whistleblower’s goals behave the same way. Stop the fraud. Keep my job. Protect patients or taxpayers. Clear my name. Receive the share of the recovery the government offers relators as an incentive to come forward.

Some of these goals pull against each other. Over a case that can run for years, their order will shift. Write them down at the start. Rank them. Expect to revisit the ranking.

4. What are our means?

Counting is easy, Cohen argues. The real variables are whether your organizations can do what you need and whether you have reserves when something unexpected happens. Most militaries, he writes, fail to take an honest inventory of their own weaknesses.

So do most prospective whistleblowers. The means that matter are not the obvious ones:

• Firsthand knowledge of how the scheme worked, not just that something seemed wrong.
• Records that show it, gathered in a way a lawyer has reviewed.
• A clear account of why the false statements mattered to the government’s decision to pay. Since Universal Health Services v. Escobar (2016), materiality is where many cases turn.
• The personal reserves to wait. A complaint is filed under seal for at least 60 days, and the seal is often extended while the government investigates (§ 3730(b)(2)–(3)). The person who files has to live with silence for a long time.

5. What is our priority?

Cohen observes that wealthy, powerful countries often behave as if they need not choose. They do. His example is Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 decision to invade North Africa, over the objections of his top commanders, so that American forces would be fighting in the European theater within a year of Pearl Harbor and the “Germany first” policy would keep public support. Cohen judges that Roosevelt had the priority right.

For an employee, the choice is among career, case and family, in some order. The law offers protection: an employee retaliated against for lawful efforts to stop a False Claims Act violation can seek reinstatement, double back pay and special damages, and must sue within three years (§ 3730(h)). Protection is not the same as an easy life. Sometimes family must come first.

Decide what comes first before the pressure starts, not after, and give the question a lot of time and discussion with family members.

There are many times, especially with younger medical professionals, when I will make great efforts to persuade them not to proceed. Young medical professionals just out of school, or just out of an internship, may jeopardize their whole career to right a wrong. When they have children to support, proceeding may simply be too risky. The strategy then is to say no and let someone else come forward.

6. In what sequence should we act?

Here, Cohen says, Roosevelt went wrong. He believed he could take North Africa and still invade France in 1943. North Africa took longer than expected; Sicily followed, then Italy, and each step led to the next. One move constrained the one after it.

Order matters just as much to a whistleblower. Raising the issue internally, consulting a lawyer, preserving records, filing, and telling family each carry consequences that depend on what came before. Confronting a supervisor before getting advice can alert the company. Talking to coworkers can put the confidentiality of a sealed case at risk.

The rule I give people: get advice before the first step you cannot take back.

7. What is our theory of victory?

Cohen calls this the hardest question. Put simply: why do we think this will work? He recalls sitting in the White House Situation Room while senior officials debated sending more soldiers, diplomats or money to Afghanistan, without anyone asking how those moves were supposed to lead to success.

A whistleblower’s theory of victory is a story with a specific ending. The government reads the complaint and the supporting disclosure. It sees false claims, made knowingly, about something that mattered to payment. It decides the case deserves its limited resources. Each link in that chain has to hold.

If you cannot tell the story out loud, from the fraud to the recovery, the case is not ready yet.

Supporting documentary evidence that clearly proves the violations is critical to advancing a case.

The traps

Cohen spends much of his essay on why decision-makers fail even when they know the right questions. Three of the traps he describes apply directly.

• Exhaustion and illness. Cohen cites Prime Minister Anthony Eden, ill and heavily medicated during the 1956 Suez crisis. Lord David Owen, a physician and former British Foreign Secretary, examined the case in In Sickness and in Power and concluded that Eden’s condition impaired his judgment. Whistleblowers often decide under stress, short of sleep, sometimes after being demoted or isolated. That is the worst time to make an irreversible choice alone.
• Anchoring. Drawing on the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Cohen describes how we judge a new situation against an existing reference point. An employee who once watched a colleague fired for complaining may overestimate the danger. One who read about a large settlement may underestimate the time and cost.
• Groupthink. Irving Janis’s term covers discounted warnings, self-censorship and the sidelining of dissenters. Those are often the very conditions that let a fraud continue. They also apply closer to home: friends who agree with everything you say are not a check on your judgment.

The virtues

Cohen concludes that formal procedures help less than character. He names four qualities. Translated for the person deciding whether to report:

• Empathy: understand how both the company and the government will see the facts.
• Curiosity: learn how the rules work before acting on them.
• Humility: accept that you may be wrong about part of what you saw.
• Moral courage: face the facts as they are and decide accordingly.

Cohen ranks moral courage above the rest. It is, above all, the whistleblower’s virtue.

From the other side of the table

These questions are not only for employees. A general counsel or compliance officer deciding whether to investigate, fix a problem quietly or disclose it to the government faces the same seven. Is a whistleblower already inside? Who are the government lawyers likely to handle it? What is the realistic story of how this ends well? Companies that skip those questions repeat the errors Cohen catalogs.

Making it a habit

The questions work on smaller decisions too.

Write the seven questions on a card. Before any decision that cannot be undone, answer each one in writing. The questions you cannot answer tell you what you still need to find out.

With each answer, ask one more question: What evidence do I have, within my job, to prove each point about the fraud? Write the answer down and read it.

Strategy may rarely be mastered. But it can be practiced, and the time to practice is before you need it.

Jeff Newman Law is a national whistleblower law firm that handles whistleblower cases under the False Claims Act, including healthcare and tariff fraud matters and other kinds of cases. Reach the firm at www.jeffnewmanlaw.com or 617-823-3217.

Sources

• Eliot A. Cohen, “Why Is Strategy So Difficult?” The Atlantic, Oct. 20, 2026 (adapted from The Strategist): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/10/strategy-military-politics-war/689072/
• Princeton University Press, The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics (Oct. 20, 2026): https://press.princeton.edu/node/70872
• Civitas Institute, review of The Strategist: https://www.civitasinstitute.org/research/the-burdens-of-the-war-strategist
• Council on Foreign Relations, “The Seven Questions Every Military Strategist Must Ask” (podcast with Eliot Cohen): https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/presidents-inbox/the-seven-questions-every-military-strategist-must-ask
• 31 U.S.C. § 3730 (Office of the Law Revision Counsel): https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title31-section3730&num=0&edition=prelim
• Universal Health Services, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Escobar, 579 U.S. 176 (2016).
• Kellogg Brown & Root Services, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Carter, 575 U.S. 650 (2015).
• David Owen, In Sickness and in Power: Illness in Heads of Government During the Last 100 Years (Methuen, 2008); review in Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/node/1069960