Michael Baker (’19): From Military Intelligence to AI

Michael Baker (’19) came to IWP to further his career in military intelligence. What he found was a deep historical perspective and a grasp of natural law that would guide his decisions throughout his career. He completed his degree over six years amid four deployments.

Frustrated by technology designed with little understanding of the Intelligence Community’s needs, Michael decided to engineer his own solutions. Today, he is CEO of a company that provides AI solutions for United States Special Operations units and is working on breakthrough technology that will allow paralyzed veterans to use their brainwaves to move a wheelchair.

Below, he discusses getting advice from his IWP professor on a real-world problem, using his natural law background to inform battlefield decisions, and the groundbreaking work he is doing in AI.

A Career in Military Intelligence

Michael always knew that he wanted to do military service of some sort. As an Eagle Scout, he was inspired by the military leaders in his troop. He eventually graduated from John Carroll University and from its ROTC program, and he was placed into military intelligence.

“I fell in love with it,” he said. He began his Army career as a reservist, serving as a military intelligence officer in Ohio. He knew that if he wanted to transition to work in D.C., he would need a little more experience, so he began researching master’s degree programs.

Master’s Studies Amidst Deployments

Michael chose IWP based on its specialized curriculum, the intimate class sizes, and the availability of the professors. “There were several times during my IWP experience that my professors really went out of their way to meet with me to share their experiences, even one-on-one,” he recalled.

For instance, while taking Prof. Robert Stephan’s intelligence class, Michael found himself in the midst of a real-world issue that directly fell under Prof. Stephan’s area of expertise. Prof. Stephan met with Michael outside of class to discuss this problem set as far as they could in an unclassified environment. “It ended up working out really well,” said Michael.

Michael completed his IWP degree over the course of about six years while serving with the U.S. Army Reserve. He deployed four times – twice to Syria, once to Iraq, and once to Qatar. At the time, IWP did not yet offer online programs, so when he was back in D.C., he persisted in his studies.

Applying Studies in History and Natural Law

When asked about the most valuable parts of his IWP education, Michael reflects that his studies in history and natural law have most profoundly affected his life and career.

“In a military training program, you will learn a small tidbit of history, but IWP served as a far more critical point for providing historical perspective in depth that I don’t think I could have gotten anywhere else,” said Michael. “Even the perspectives that seem basic and lacking in the tech used for intelligence, like events in the Revolutionary War, are significant. It is important to intimately understand lessons from history and be ready to apply them in real life.”

He also found that, “IWP’s focus on the Western moral tradition helped shape me at a very critical time.” In Amb. Alberto Piedra’s class, he studied natural law. “We learned that the natural order of things should be greater than any man-made rule,” remembered Michael.

“I found that throughout my military career and into my civilian career, it was critical to be able to apply the natural law and understand what was morally right when it came to making tough decisions,” he said. “That has been a cornerstone of every decision point for me, and of every job.”

Michael’s first combat deployment sent him to Syria while ISIS still held Raqqa. “Even in a supporting role like the Intelligence Community, there are a lot of very difficult decisions to make,” he said. “The military is eager to carry out its mission and take horrible people off the battlefield, but sometimes there’s real ambiguity. In those moments, I was able to advise commanders against proceeding – which is hard, because it doesn’t make you the most popular person in the room.”

Michael is glad that he had natural law principles to guide him in these tricky situations. “I’m very thankful for the decisions I made – especially when I chose the hard right decisions instead of the easy wrong decisions. It stems from what is taught at IWP.”

Shifting to Technical Expertise

IWP’s intelligence classes also helped Michael to be more effective in his military intelligence work in general. “IWP certainly served as the foundation for a lot of my analytical work,” he said.

In the course of his military work, Michael became frustrated with technological solutions designed by engineers who had never worked in the IC. He would ask for a widget, and he would receive one he did not want or need.

His frustration led him to decide to build better solutions himself.

To achieve this, he had to become an engineer. He earned a second master’s degree at Johns Hopkins and did additional graduate work at Harvard. “This is where I got my baseline knowledge to write my own machine learning and AI models from scratch,” he said.

Building AI Solutions for Defense and Medicine

Michael is now the Founder and CEO of Talon Neural Systems, LLC, which creates custom machine learning algorithms from scratch for its customers. Instead of bringing ChatGPT or other large models into an environment, Talon focuses on building what the customer needs from scratch, giving the customer peace of mind that they have what they need while also reducing their costs by about 90%.

Michael’s company focuses both on defense applications and medical research.

On the defense side, U.S. Special Operations units have been the main target area, and he has been invited to technical experimentation events.

He noted, “With my foundational background at IWP, coupled with my own military intelligence experience, I innately know what an intelligence analyst would need – I understand why I need to build a particular tool because I have been there. When I was in Iraq and Syria, I would deploy with Special Operations units, and now I’m building tools for those units.”

The other part of Michael’s company is focused on medical research. “I really wanted my machine learning algorithms to help individuals, or to help small organizations do great things.”

Groundbreaking AI Applications in Medicine

Michael wanted to see if his algorithms from the defense side could support challenging problems in the medical field. He uses publicly available datasets from the medical field to train his algorithms. This data is within HIPAA regulations and is mostly used for coding.

Michael has built custom machine learning algorithms that find tumors in mammograms with over 90% accuracy.

Michael had been interested in serving the veteran community’s medical needs with his AI solutions, but he had not previously connected with any major representatives of this community. After leading a mentoring session for IWP students on Irregular Warfare Support in 2025, Michael connected on LinkedIn through a family member of an IWP student who happened to work with the Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA). “This is how I found out about PVA – literally through IWP,” he said.

PVA was the first organization to accept a meeting with him and has been incredibly supportive.

Since then, Michael has developed a way for paralyzed people to move a wheelchair using only their brainwaves and facial muscle activity, using a consumer-grade, $250 electroencephalogram (EEG) headband. (EEG systems that are used in a lab environment can cost from $30,000-$75,000.)

To train his algorithm, which scored over 90% accuracy, Michael used publicly available EEG data that involved people thinking about moving their arms and legs. He went on to develop his own EEG ML training pipeline that anyone can use out of the comfort of their own home. Michael’s machine learning model interprets these brainwaves and translates them into directions for moving a wheelchair.

Michael’s goal is to secure Congressional funding to get this solution FDA-approved – and ultimately get it in the hands of all paralyzed veterans.

A longer-term goal for Michael is to build an established laboratory where veterans work alongside engineers to advise them and help them understand how to create solutions for the military and for the medical needs of the wider veteran community.