Mir Sadat is a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense program of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He has more than twenty-five years of experience in private industry, higher education, and the US government. Sadat is on the advisory board of the University of Southern California’s Center for Research in Space Technologies and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies.

Sadat recently founded and currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Dauntless, an independent and inclusive forum committed to understanding and advancing US and allied space power. Previously, he founded and served as the first editor-in-chief of the Space Force Journal after completing his detail to the US National Security Council (NSC), where, as a policy director, he led interagency coordination on defense and space policy issues. In that role, he supported the establishment of both the US Space Force and US Space Command in recognition that space has also evolved into a warfighting domain similar to land, air, sea, and cyber. While on the NSC, Sadat also prioritized national security decisions involving US civil space and the commercial space sector. He led multiple efforts to reduce US risk and critical dependencies in US civil space and the commercial industrial base on foreign nations who view the United States as an adversary. Sadat pushed for innovative US policies to power space vehicles with modular nuclear reactors, secure the space supply chain, improve strategic messaging for space, establish norms and behavior in space, and to prevail in a new era of strategic technical competition. In 2021, he co-authored “Space Policies for the New Space Age: Competing on the Final Economic Frontier” and “Space Budgeting for Modern Times.”

He is also a naval officer with intelligence and space qualifications. In his preceding three naval assignments, he served as a space policy strategist with the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, a space operations officer with the US Tenth Fleet/US Fleet Cyber Command, and a military aide to the secretary of Navy. Sadat has also spent a considerable amount of time in various assignments within the US national security enterprise. In addition, he has previously deployed to overseas contingency operations in Afghanistan, where he served as a strategic advisor to two International Security Assistance Force commanding generals. Since August 2021, he has helped stand up Global Friends of Afghanistan, a US-based nonprofit organization that educates people about the history, culture, and current events affecting Afghanistan.

Sadat has also served as a cultural advisor to two Hollywood productions—The Kite Runner and Charlie Wilson’s War. He has a PhD from Claremont Graduate University and has taught at various universities in California and Washington, DC. Sadat has also served as an adjunct scholar with the Modern War Institute at West Point and a visiting scholar in the Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He has trained and educated US and NATO troops on a variety of topics to increase their operational capability and strategic impact. Sadat has written extensively on US national security, space, Afghanistan, South Asia, and the broader Middle East.