Business schools teach operations as a subject built around process design, procurement efficiency, and the mechanics of scaling a company. Justin Fulcher spent six months learning a version of that subject under conditions no curriculum committee would ever choose to design, working as a senior advisor inside the Defense Department.
The Pentagon runs on infrastructure built for problems that predate the ones it now faces. Fulcher has argued that artificial intelligence offers a genuine path to upgrade those capabilities, but only when new tools integrate into existing workflows instead of demanding that the institution rebuild itself first. It is the same principle that guided his earlier work at RingMD, the telehealth startup he founded that operated in markets where unreliable infrastructure limited what any new technology could deliver to patients.
Inertia Is Not the Same as Dysfunction
Working to modernize the tools the Department uses day to day, Justin Fulcher says, made institutional friction visible in a way that outside consulting never could. Outdated processes inside a federal agency rarely trace back to incompetence. They accumulate over decades from decisions that made sense individually at the time and were simply never revisited once circumstances changed.
“The Pentagon doesn’t run only on strategy decks,” 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.”
That distinction, between constraints worth keeping and ones worth removing, sits at the center of how Justin Fulcher describes his six months at the Pentagon. It is a judgment call that no operations textbook can teach on its own, and one he says now shapes how he approaches technology advising in defense and national security work, where the same tension between old habits and new tools keeps showing up. Read this article for additional information.
More about Justin Fulcher on https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrjustinfulcher