David Wurmser is a Swiss-American former Middle East Adviser to US Vice President Dick Cheney. Wurmser, a neoconservative, previously served as special assistant to John R. Bolton at the State Department and was a former research fellow on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He served in the U.S. Navy Reserve as an intelligence officer at the rank of Lieutenant Commander.

Wurmser has a Ph.D. in international relations from Johns Hopkins University He has been credited as being one of the main authors of the 1996 report A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, a paper prepared for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. This advocated pre-emptive strikes against Iran and Syria, the removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq and the abandonment of traditional "land for peace" negotiations with Palestinians.

In 2000, Wurmser helped draft a document entitled "Ending Syria’s Occupation of Lebanon: the US Role?", which called for a confrontation with the regime in Damascus. The document said that Syria was developing "weapons of mass destruction".