Before he worked at the Pentagon, Justin Fulcher built RingMD, a telehealth startup that operated in markets where infrastructure limited what technology could deliver. That early work taught him a principle he later carried to Washington: the technology that earns adoption is the technology that reduces friction.
Fulcher spent six months as a senior advisor at the Department Defense, focusing on acquisition reform and IT modernization. He describes a department running on infrastructure that predates the problems it now faces. Artificial intelligence offers a real path to upgrade those capabilities, in his view, but only if it fits cleanly into existing workflows. Tools that require an institution to redesign itself first tend to stall.
Inertia Versus Dysfunction
One of the sharpest distinctions Justin Fulcher draws concerns outdated processes. He argues that clunky procedures in a federal agency rarely stem from incompetence. They are the accumulated output of decades of decisions, each logical when made and never fully revisited.
Telling institutional inertia apart from true dysfunction, he contends, is a responsibility that serious technology advising demands. Outside consultants seldom develop that sense, because the drag only becomes legible from inside.
“The Pentagon doesn’t run only on strategy decks,” Justin Fulcher has said. “It runs on relationships, institutional knowledge, and a set of processes that were built for a different era. The work is figuring out which of those constraints are worth preserving and which ones are just costing the Department time.”
An Operations Course Nobody Would Design
Business schools teach process management, procurement efficiency, and the mechanics of scaling. Fulcher sees government as a tougher version of that same course, delivered under conditions no curriculum committee would choose.
For Justin Fulcher, the Pentagon extended a pattern that began years earlier in places with unreliable infrastructure. In both settings, progress depended on meeting users inside the workflows they already had. He now applies that understanding to his work in defense technology and national security. Read this article for additional information.
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