Umar Ahmed Badami

Director, Wargaming Division

Umar Ahmed Badami is the Director of the Wargaming Division at the Irregular Warfare Initiative. His team designs IWI’s annual tabletop exercises, which bring together government, industry, partners, and academia to tackle strategic competition problem sets, along with bespoke wargames for special operations customers. Outside of IWI, Umar is a contractor supporting USSOCOM, and is also a certified flight instructor and software engineer. He holds a Bachelors of Science in Foreign Service from the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service, and is working towards a Master’s from the Georgetown Center of Security Studies, focusing on the intersections between technology, irregular warfare doctrine, and strategic competition in the Middle East.