Mir Sadat

Mir Sadat is an American author, military officer, professor, and former policy director of the United States National Security Council.

Early life and education

Sadat was born in Germany's former capital city of Bonn. His parents were born in Kabul, Afghanistan. He emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1984 at the age of 9. Sadat finished high school and higher education in southern California.

He has a PhD from Claremont Graduate University.

Career

In the U.S. Navy, Sadat's assignments included being a Naval Attache for the U.S. Department of Defense, Space Policy Strategist for the Chief of Naval Operations and a Space Operations Officer in the U.S. Tenth Fleet.

Sadat was a professor at the National Intelligence University in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in Space Policy, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran issues. He has also taught in the Center of Security Studies at Georgetown University, Pitzer College, and San Diego State University. Sadat has served as adjunct scholar with the Modern War Institute at West Point, a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and post-doctorate fellow at University of California, Berkeley.

Sadat served as a Director at the U.S. National Security Council and led the interagency coordination on defense and space policy issues. During his time in the White House, the NSC oversaw the establishment of the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command.

Sadat led multiple key projects with NASA to reduce U.S. risk and dependencies in the US Space Program on foreign nations who view America as an adversary.

While on the NSC, Sadat worked on an initiative to power space vehicles with modular nuclear reactors. He advanced space policies on supply chain, nuclear power, and strategic technical competition.

Along with co-author Bruce Cahan, Sadat authored U.S. Space Policy for the New Space Age: Competing on the Final Frontier, proposing policy changes to address economic aspects of American space policy.

In 2020, he founded Space Force Journal which launched its first issue in January 2021. Sadat departed the journal in January 2022 to found Dauntless Space devoted to understanding and advancing U.S. and allied spacepower.