How SIS Helped One Veteran Understand the “Why” Behind the Mission
Jason Baker, SIS/MIS ’19, had served in the U.S. Air Force for more than a decade when he started an online master’s program at the School of International Service (SIS) while on active duty.
“At the time, I was stationed in Georgia,” he said. “And someone told me about the SIS online program, and it kind of almost seemed too good to be true.”
But about a week or two into his very first class, Baker was deployed to Korea, setting off what would be a very interconnected journey of studying foreign policy and national security while watching both play out in real time. Suddenly, he was attending class, “with a front-row seat to a very hectic time on the peninsula there,” he said.
For Baker, quick deployment was nothing new. Over the 20 years he spent in the Air Force, his career spanned roles from combat aviation to defense strategy before he retired as a lieutenant colonel earlier this year. For most of that time, he was on the receiving end of foreign policy: the person who gets sent in when a president announces a mission. What SIS's master's of international service added was the theory behind it—or, as he puts it, “learning how to think about the world.”
Joining “The Best Team There Is”
Baker grew up in rural Illinois, in a small town where, he recalls, his graduating class had fewer than 120 students. The military wasn’t on his radar until he attended a summer program that included a session from the ROTC, which sparked his interest.
“They were trying to play to the whole like, ‘Oh, are you on a team or were you an athlete? Well, you know, the military is the best team that there is,’” he said.
Things really crystallized for him a couple of weeks into his senior year of high school, when he watched live during his English class as the second plane of the 9/11 terrorist attacks hit the Twin Towers. Later that week, it seemed that the whole town, and even neighboring towns, had turned out for the school’s football match as an opportunity to come together after the attacks.
“I caught a touchdown pass in our football game,” he said. “And the crowd was full of people waving not flags of our mascot, but of the USA, and I made my decision.”
He went home, finished his ROTC paperwork that night, and turned it in the next Monday morning.
“I just thought, ‘What is the way that I can really make an impact to keep this from happening again?’”
A scholarship took him to the University of Illinois, his father’s alma mater and home to a large Air Force ROTC program. He graduated with a political science degree and was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
Baker expected to serve only the standard four to six years, but each time he could have gotten out, the reasons to stay kept adding up: the free training, the friends, the satisfaction of doing something important—and, of course, the chance to fly. Eventually, he said, it only made sense to stay the full 20 years.
Understanding the System
Baker described his earlier years in the military as spent with his head down, learning the ins and outs of his various jobs. But the more he served, the more he began to see the overarching impacts of grand strategy, and the more he wanted to make sense of it.
“I'd always been interested in, ‘How does America work? How does American policy get made?’ But the more I deployed, the more I saw things like how military defense budgets affect what missions do or don't happen around the world, why you do this with allies or don't. I got very interested in the whole thinking about the world—I wanted to understand the system that I'm a part of.”
He also knew he wanted a career in national security or foreign policy after the military, and that wearing a uniform alone wouldn’t give him the credibility or know-how to work on the policy side. He chose a master’s at SIS because of its reputation for putting policy into practice.
At SIS, Baker was struck by how every professor had real-world experience—from the National Security Council to the intelligence community—enabling students to test theory against real-world practice.
Studying while he was still in service, Baker also saw that relationship firsthand. Korea was an early example, he said, with the concept of deterrence. In the classroom, deterrence can sound lofty or abstract, but what makes that policy come to life, he said, is service members—many only 18- to 20-something year olds—deployed far away from their loved ones, just showing up to do their jobs.
“The pure fact of service members being on the Korean Peninsula, in and of itself, is deterrence,” he said.
Baker’s classes and classmates broadened his view immensely, he said. He had met many different people while on duty around the world, but at SIS he met people from other sectors such as nonprofits and other parts of government. He took mostly defense and national security courses, but the program also required other graduate courses, like economics, that he said were integral to developing a well-rounded understanding of how all-encompassing national security truly is.
“This sounds simple, but SIS really did a good job of like of teaching me how to think about the world,” Baker said.
Moving from National Security
Baker’s last few military assignments were in strategic planning roles focused on questions around emerging technology like AI, or how autonomous weapons would shape warfare, foreign policy, alliances, and competition with U.S. adversaries.
As he left the Air Force, he spent several months as a GovAI Seasonal Fellow, researching and writing on the impacts of AI and autonomy on national security. That led to his current role as director of national security policy at Encode AI, a nonprofit whose mission statement says it “advocates for laws, builds coalitions, and influences leaders to ensure AI is a force for good.” There, his work covers broad national security questions, like protecting critical infrastructure and guarding against catastrophic risk.
On many days, his work might not look like traditional international relations to an outsider. But SIS is always in the background, he said, in “my greater understanding of how policy and strategy gets made in America, and then where it collides with the world.”
“AI has really made me understand how broad the term national security needs to be,” Baker said.
Many people compare AI to nuclear weapons, he notes, but the key distinction, he said, is that nuclear weapons were held by governments and controlled by militaries. AI, by contrast, is widely accessible and touches everything from banking to critical infrastructure to warfare all at once. The task, he said, is harnessing the good while preventing the risks.
Continuing His Service
Reflecting on Veterans Day, Baker confessed that he is usually rather quiet about “the veteran stuff.” He doesn’t tout it, he said; for him, it was about getting the job done. But doing things like this each Veterans Day is good for him, he thinks.
“It’s good to just sort of remember, you know, not what I did, but that there were so many others that I did it with,” he said.
Today, five months into his military retirement, Baker continues to serve—only now, it’s giving back to SIS. This will be his third year as a one-on-one academic and career mentor to SIS students. He knows how hard it can be to break into the DC policy world without someone to help with a résumé or an introduction to the right person.
Even with two young kids and a busy job, he makes mentoring a priority.
“I love seeing how there's this group of eager students who want to go out and make a difference in the world,” he said. And not just in the general way that most young people want to do good, he noted, but in a deliberate and specific way, whether that’s a policy, a cause, or a country.
“It helps me think about the things that I could be doing,” he said. “But also, it is just super motivating to see that there's people who want to come up behind you, and that you have to keep pace or else they're going to lap you and take over before you're ready to let them.”