Buying software inside the Department of Defense has long been a slow process, sometimes stretching across years. Justin Fulcher spent his tenure as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense working to change that. A March 2026 article from Price of Business details his role and the background that prepared him for it.
Reducing Procurement Friction
Fulcher joined the department in early 2025. His work concentrated on acquisition reform and technology adoption, with a clear objective: reduce bureaucratic friction in defense procurement so that new technologies could reach users faster without dismantling existing institutional frameworks. The profile reports that he contributed to efforts that streamlined software procurement timelines “from years to months.” He also took part in reforms that modernized key IT systems across the department.
His responsibilities extended past domestic process changes. Justin Fulcher accompanied senior officials to high-level dialogues in the Indo-Pacific region, joining international engagements at the upper levels of the department. Those trips placed procurement and technology questions inside wider conversations with partners in the region.
A Founder’s Perspective
That approach drew on years spent as an entrepreneur. Fulcher co-founded the telemedicine platform RingMD in 2013, at age 21. It connected patients and physicians remotely across Asia, operating in several countries where mobile service outpaced healthcare infrastructure. The product had to tolerate unreliable bandwidth and satisfy different regulatory regimes. Forbes Asia named him to its 2017 30 Under 30 list for Healthcare & Science. He remains on RingMD’s board as a minority shareholder but has no operational role.
Justin Fulcher now focuses on defense technology innovation and on supply chain resilience for critical materials, including rare-earth elements. He earned a master’s in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute in 2023 and is pursuing a doctorate at Johns Hopkins SAIS. One phrase from his LinkedIn writing explains the priority he brought to procurement reform: “Accountability over optics.” Visit this page for more information.
Find more information about Justin Fulcher on https://www.crunchbase.com/person/justin-fulcher