When Justin Fulcher joined the Defense Department as a senior advisor for six months, his work centered on two connected problems: acquisition reform and IT modernization across defense agencies, both under the direction of Secretary Hegseth.
Procurement inside the Pentagon has long moved on a timeline measured in years, a pace shaped less by any single rule and more by the accumulated weight of legal review, oversight requirements, and institutional caution built up over decades. Justin Fulcher contributed to compressing that timeline down to months for select software procurement, a change he has described as an organizational problem dressed up as a technology one.
Friction Is the Real Obstacle
“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.”
Justin Fulcher has argued that artificial intelligence can genuinely upgrade the Pentagon’s aging infrastructure, but only when new tools fit into workflows that already exist rather than requiring the institution to redesign itself around them first. That principle traces back to his earlier work at RingMD, the telehealth company he built across fifty countries, many of them places where infrastructure limits, not ambition, decided what technology could reach patients.
Fulcher finished his six months at the Pentagon and returned to defense technology and national security work, where he says the acquisition reform and modernization effort taught him more about how large institutions actually adopt new tools than any prior advisory engagement had. The lesson, in his telling, was less about the technology itself and more about the patience required to introduce it without breaking what already works for the people who depend on it. See related link for additional information.
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