How I Got My Career in Foreign Policy: Erin D. Dumbacher

Originally from Huntsville, Alabama, Erin D. Dumbacher grew up around folks doing “literal rocket science.” Her environment and enduring fascination with the legacy of the Cold War nurtured an interest in nuclear policy. After years working in the private sector, Erin attended graduate school to double down on her passion. Since then, her career has taken her from the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) to the halls of the Pentagon. Currently, she is the Stanton nuclear security senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Read more about how her unorthodox start in the media industry served her later on, her advice on switching careers, and how geography can influence national security.

Here’s how Erin Dumbacher got her career in foreign policy.

We always kick off with the same question: What did you want to be when you were little?

An architect. I liked the challenge of designing to solve a problem, and I thought the models that architects made were super cool.

That’s an interesting throughline—the problem-solving aspect. So going from there, when did you discover a fascination with nuclear policy?

That took some time. Where I grew up, almost everyone around me was involved in defense, national security, and space exploration.

I’m from Huntsville, Alabama, which is the home of U.S. space launches and rocket propulsion engineering for NASA. My grandfather worked on missile defense—he was part of the original team that built the Patriot missile battery. My father spent most of his career at NASA as a propulsion engineer. He’s now a professor in aerospace engineering.

Everyone around me was in that world. I also went to school with a lot of children of former Army officers—Huntsville is a major center for Army and missile defense. I was keenly aware of the engineers and physicists around me. The place where I went to high school actually had the highest per capita of PhDs in the whole country, because they were all doing literal rocket science.

So I had really good science and math education there, and it was so good that it gave me enough awareness to know I was interested in technology and international politics—like the effects of the United States having missile defenses, or what it meant for the United States to have its own space exploration program.

But I also was keenly aware that the engineering problem wasn’t the part I was most interested in. What motivated me much more was the people part—the social science, the political science, the diplomacy.

When I graduated college, I was interested in technology issues and policy. I had spent a large part of my undergraduate years interning on Capitol Hill for a member of Congress who represented Huntsville, Alabama. I got to help somewhat with all the space and missile defense and appropriations work.

By the time I graduated, I was starting to focus more on the technology policy piece within national security, but in a really broad way. But I didn’t go to work directly in policy.

I had a question about that! You obviously have all this interest, you do the schooling, but then your first job was in media? You were a strategy analyst and market researcher at Atlantic Media and then Corporate Executive Board. What happened there?

Well, a couple of things happened. I graduated in January 2007, so this was before the big financial crisis of 2008. There were a few opportunities on Capitol Hill for me at that time, but they didn’t pay very well. It also didn’t seem like there were a lot of viable ways to be a full-time government employee—to join the State Department or anything like that. At that time, it just didn’t seem like there were a lot of foreign policy opportunities for people straight out of undergrad.

I was intrigued by the private sector’s ability to let me do research right off the bat. I got to run surveys, focus groups, interviews—all of this stuff that was related to media and technology policy.

So it wasn’t totally unrelated?

Right. It was really functional. They hired me to help understand, for a Capitol Hill audience actually, what the so-called Information Age meant. This was 2007—before the iPhone. People in politics were just starting to use Blackberries. The media company was trying to figure out how to make money online, how to switch from print to digital.

So it had this technology component, and it had the research component, even if it wasn’t directly related to foreign policy or some of the broader issues I was interested in.

Okay, so how did you end up pivoting to nuclear policy? Because this is a big jump—in 2017 you join the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Yes. So I had what I call this mini career in the private sector. At some point, I realized I needed to go back to school and get back on track to work full time in policy. I went to graduate school late—much later than most people get their master’s.

The benefit of that was I’d already paid off a lot of my undergraduate student loans. Obviously there are downsides of that too, but it allowed me in graduate school to really focus on what mattered most to me and what motivated me.

I wrote my master’s thesis on applying arms control models from the nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction field to cyber issues. So that was bringing in the cybersecurity and technology work I’d been paying attention to in the private sector, but also learning from history—learning what models we could apply.

I was really fortunate that the Nuclear Threat Initiative, at the time, was running this very large research project called the Nuclear Security Index. It ranked nuclear security conditions in 192 countries around the world. It was a big data effort, and they needed a project manager for it. Of course, that’s the type of work I had done in the private sector. I had this interest, and I had written about cyber and arms control and emerging technologies as they relate to our long-standing arms control agreements.

So they took a chance on me, frankly. There were people who would have had a lot more nuclear experience on their resume that I would have been competing with, but they wanted me to run this index project. From a skills perspective, it was a really good fit.

I got there and learned a lot of nuclear jargon, but I also used all my research skills to help deliver the index and plug that into foreign policy. Eventually my portfolio turned into cyber and emerging technology issues as they relate to nuclear weapons. I’d had these touchpoints to these issues, but NTI was the first place where I could do it full time, all the time. That was really exciting.

From there, I was interested more in the emerging technology piece. There was this great opportunity to go to In-Q-Tel to help stand up their policy translation mechanism—from all the emerging tech venture capital investments they were doing to what it meant for national security policy. That was really exciting, and I went there for a short while before I had the opportunity to go into the Pentagon.

Before we go further, I’m curious—during your schooling, you did the Fulbright in Estonia, and you also spent time in Warsaw and Berlin. How did these experiences abroad shape your understanding of international security?

Unlike a lot of my peers, when I was in undergrad studying international relations—this was the early 2000s, and lots of folks were looking at the Middle East and the global War on Terror—I was always fascinated by the Cold War. I didn’t think it had really been resolved.

I had studied NATO accession and expansion, so going to Poland, east Germany, and Estonia were all really helpful in understanding, on the ground, the impact of NATO in particular, but also multinational organizations, deterrence—all of these big picture Cold War legacy policy matters and histories that a lot of my peers at the time weren’t really engaging with.

I had incredible opportunities to spend a lot of time with other European students from all over—not just Polish or Estonian, but folks from everywhere. I was at the Warsaw School of Economics learning about their economic transition from a socialist system. 

But I also made friends. You spend time getting to know people, they start to trust you, and then you start to hear the very real life stories of their families. Grandmothers who were sent to gulags multiple times, what it was like to live under authoritarian regimes. That was just so distinct from the stories of my own family members in the exact same period. To learn literally what life was like under the Iron Curtain brought a whole new perspective and context to what we talk about in these very abstract ways sometimes in political science.

I was trying to understand what In-Q-Tel is. It’s a venture capital firm that was founded by the CIA?

It is a strategic investing organization that receives seed funding from the U.S. intelligence community to go out and make investments that could improve the technology available not just for intelligence, but for the national security space more broadly.

It specifically came about because so many of these technologies that started to really matter for national security were emerging from the commercial sector rather than from government labs. In-Q-Tel was stood up to augment what the government labs were doing, but also to go out to Silicon Valley and have touchpoints with the commercial industry and dual-use capabilities to see what would work and improve, and make sure that U.S. national security could benefit from what the very robust U.S. commercial enterprise was developing.

You were director for strategic policy analysis. What appealed to you about melding the worlds of tech investment and policy?

This dual-use issue. So many cutting-edge technologies today—especially artificial intelligence, which is the clearest example—have national security implications that those of us in the policy community don’t always see. We’re often heads down working hard to solve a particular problem, not realizing that there’s an up-and-coming technology that could totally change the game and that U.S. adversaries might also be examining, because it’s commercially available and they can.

So I liked the idea of connecting those dots. I also liked the idea of spending more time with the technologists—when you’re making venture investments in technology firms in the United States, you are seeing the cutting edge, how far we’ve come, and also how far we haven’t in certain technology areas. So I liked the idea that I could learn that for myself but also teach that back to the policy community in a more realistic, practical way.

A couple of the projects I worked on there are now coming back into the news. For example, I wrote a big report on critical minerals and the gap in U.S. production and reprocessing because of what had happened in recent decades—China had taken on so much more market share—and what that meant for us as a national security matter. I also wrote about energy and transmission. If you have a bunch of new solar power and wind power coming online but you don’t have the infrastructure to get that power to the parts of the grid that need it at the right time, what’s the point in some of those investments?

Understanding this gave me a really good impression of industrial policy and where U.S. leadership could hopefully prompt more commercial enterprise.

It’s cool that you get to see this full life cycle. In 2024, you became a CFR international affairs fellow while working at the Pentagon.

I wasn’t a CFR employee, actually. I did the International Affairs Fellowship (IAF), which allowed me to go to the Pentagon. The beauty of the IAF is that you go through the application process with some ideas about where you might want to serve. In my case, I wanted to go into government, so I had some ideas, but it was kind of open. I had a lot of options. I got to explore where in government I wanted to be, and I was essentially free labor to the government, so I had some amazing opportunities to determine what would be the right fit for me and where I thought I could make the most impact.

I had a great time and learned a ton working for a new office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon focused on emerging tech and emerging capabilities. I decided that the strategy piece—bringing emerging tech together with broader foreign policy questions—would be a really good fit. And I was totally right. It was an incredible experience.

Let’s zoom out to some bigger career questions. For young people starting out, do you have advice for charting a career path? Or is there advice you wish someone had given you?

I like thinking about ladders in the context of career development.

I’ve tried a couple of different career ladders throughout my career so far—the private sector, the nonprofit sector, and government. It’s been very beneficial for me to have hopped between different ladders. I learned a lot of skills that I don’t think everyone gets to if you pick a single ladder and, for example, become a foreign service officer hoping to climb all the way up to being an ambassador. I also don’t think that happens very much anymore.

The downside of hopping ladders is that sometimes you have to get off the first one, go all the way back down, and kind of start over, or hop a couple rungs down and climb back up. I was arguably more senior coming out of the private sector before graduate school than in the job I took right after. But I was happy to do it because it was a different ladder, a different field—and it was the ladder I wanted to be on.

One of my big suggestions for people starting their careers now is to be thoughtful and conscious of which ladder you’re on, but also not be afraid to climb a couple rungs, reevaluate, and say, “Maybe there’s a different opportunity for me.”

Also, when you’re applying for five hundred jobs and throwing your resume into lots of inboxes, it’s helpful to remind yourself that all it takes is one yes. You only need one hiring manager to take that bet on you.

Eventually, later in life, you want to be that one person who’s not thinking about who the traditional fit is or who you already know, but who’s willing to take the bet on the person who has the drive, the skills, and the focus to do the work.

We always ask the same fun, ending question. I’m sure over the years you’ve had many fascinating work trips and maybe work meals on those trips. Is there a favorite memory you could share with us?

I took some short side trips when I was living in Warsaw that were really fun and interesting places. I went to a town where Copernicus had lived at one point, and there is a lovely statue there featuring him and some of his earliest assessments of the cosmos. So that was a highlight.

There are some incredible locations across Estonia, especially in the summer. The sun doesn’t set—as far north as Anchorage, Alaska, it stays bright until 5 a.m., when it gets a little dusk-like, and then the sun starts to come up thirty minutes later. It’s incredible.

That’s another place where you realize geography can impact all aspects of life, including politics, policy, and foreign policy. The Estonians share ancestral and linguistic relationships with the Finns, but Finland was not part of the Soviet Union and Estonia was, even though there’s just a small sea between them. You realize geography can really advantage you in the international security context, or create significant disadvantages.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It represents the views and opinions solely of the interviewee. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.