Government procurement has a reputation for moving slowly, and defense procurement often moves slower still. When Justin Fulcher joined the U.S. Department of Defense in early 2025 as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, that reputation was the exact problem his role was built to address.

Justin Fulcher’s focus centered on acquisition reform and technology adoption, two areas where the department had long struggled to keep pace with the private sector. Software procurement timelines that once stretched across years became one of his central targets, and he contributed to reforms that helped compress some of those timelines down to months rather than years, alongside efforts to modernize key IT systems used across the department.

A Background Suited to the Task

Fulcher’s path into this work was not the typical route through defense contracting or military service. He built his early career as a healthcare technology entrepreneur, co-founding the telemedicine company RingMD in 2013 and scaling it across multiple countries in Asia. That experience, designing systems that had to function under real world constraints like unreliable bandwidth and uneven infrastructure, translated into a working style suited to institutions where change happens slowly and carefully.

His role also carried an international dimension. Fulcher took part in high level engagements abroad, including accompanying senior officials to dialogues in the Indo-Pacific region, work that placed his acquisition reform efforts within a broader conversation about how the United States modernizes its defense posture overseas.

A Guiding Philosophy

Justin Fulcher summarized his approach to public service in a LinkedIn post: “Execution over narrative. Accountability over optics. Durability over speed.” That statement doubles as a fair description of the acquisition reform work itself, less concerned with announcements than with whether new processes actually hold up once implemented across a department as large and complex as Defense. Read this article for more information.

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