National Vitality

Why Great Societies Build, Renew, and Believe in the Future

Several years ago, I walked through a manufacturing facility in South Carolina that most people would never think twice about.

The building itself was forgettable. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. Concrete floors worn smooth by decades of use. Welders throwing sparks across cavernous rooms that smelled faintly of oil, heat, and steel. Half-finished components stacked beside aging machinery that looked as though it had survived three different economic eras.

But the place felt alive.

Not polished.
Not optimized.
Alive.

Engineers moved quickly between stations with the quiet intensity of people solving real problems. Forklifts cut through organized chaos. Conversations were direct, practical, urgent. Nobody appeared especially interested in status, performance, or institutional theater. The focus was entirely on production.

Building.
Shipping.
Improving.
Solving.

You could feel momentum in the air.

The Feeling of a Living Society

Over the years, I’ve encountered that same feeling in very different places.

In startup offices in Silicon Valley where small teams worked late into the night trying to build products that did not yet exist. In rapidly expanding Asian cities where cranes permanently occupied the skyline. In semiconductor and logistics hubs operating with astonishing precision. In parts of America’s defense industrial base where exhausted but determined teams still carried an almost wartime sense of mission beneath layers of procurement friction and institutional drag.

And I have experienced the opposite feeling too.

Cities that feel suspended rather than advancing.
Institutions optimized to preserve process instead of produce outcomes.
Organizations that have become extraordinarily sophisticated at managing inertia.

The difference between these places is not simply wealth.

Some wealthy societies feel exhausted.
Some imperfect societies feel intensely alive.

And increasingly, I’ve come to believe we are missing language for one of the most important strategic realities of the 21st century:

National vitality.

I think of national vitality as the ability of a society to generate energy, ambition, innovation, cohesion, and productive capacity across generations.

It is civilization’s capacity to convert human potential into coordinated forward motion.

Institutional Metabolism

Just as metabolism determines whether a body converts energy into motion, vitality determines whether a civilization converts talent, ambition, capital, and trust into progress.

Vital societies possess this metabolic energy.

They transform ambition into institutions, institutions into production, production into confidence, and confidence into further ambition.

This is what I increasingly think of as institutional metabolism:
the speed at which a society can transform ideas into execution.

How quickly can it:

• build infrastructure,

• deploy capital,

• educate talent,

• manufacture advanced systems,

• adapt institutions,

• solve problems,

• and coordinate collective action?

The defining challenge of many advanced societies is not lack of wealth.

It is declining institutional metabolism.

Complex civilizations often become trapped beneath the administrative weight of their own success.

And yet modern societies rarely discuss vitality directly.

Instead, we measure outputs.

GDP.
Quarterly earnings.
Stock indexes.
Debt ratios.
Employment reports.

These matter, of course.

But history suggests societies often lose vitality long before they lose wealth.

The Psychology of National Decline

Civilizations decline psychologically before they decline materially.

The late Soviet Union still possessed military power. Late-stage empires often retain impressive skylines, financial centers, and administrative sophistication. Even failing institutions can appear functional long after they have become internally exhausted.

Because the deepest forms of decline are usually energetic before they become economic.

The ambition fades before the balance sheet collapses.

You can often sense it first in culture.
Then institutions.
Then infrastructure.
Then demographics.
Then eventually economics.

A society slowly becomes more procedural than productive.
More managerial than ambitious.
More focused on distributing existing wealth than creating new wealth.

Talented people increasingly optimize for navigation instead of creation.

This pattern appears across civilizations, governments, corporations, and institutions alike.

In startups, vitality is immediately obvious.

You can feel when an organization genuinely believes growth is possible. Teams move differently. Problems are attacked with energy instead of deferred through process. People tolerate uncertainty because they believe the future can still be shaped through effort.

You can also feel when an organization begins operating primarily to preserve itself.

Meetings multiply.
Decision cycles slow.
Internal politics expands.
Risk-aversion metastasizes.
Process becomes a substitute for momentum.

Over time, many societies drift into the same trap.

The paradox is that advanced civilizations often suppress the very forces that created their success in the first place.

As societies become wealthier and more complex, they naturally optimize for:

• stability,

• safety,

• predictability,

• procedural fairness,

• and risk reduction.

These are legitimate achievements. Functional order matters enormously.

But excessive optimization for comfort can slowly erode tolerance for ambition, experimentation, sacrifice, and dynamism — the very forces that generate renewal.

The central danger facing advanced societies is often not scarcity, but accumulated friction.

Permitting layers.
Institutional veto points.
Administrative complexity.
Cultural pessimism.
Elite fragmentation.
Short-term incentives.
A growing inability to build large systems quickly and confidently.

High-vitality societies make ambitious people feel socially useful.

Low-vitality societies increasingly channel intelligence toward status preservation rather than frontier expansion.

This may ultimately be the defining difference between civilizations that rise and civilizations that stagnate.

The Frontier Principle

History’s great ascents are almost always periods of concentrated vitality.

Postwar America.
Meiji Japan.
The American industrial expansion of the late 19th century.
Early Singapore.
The Apollo era.

Different political systems.
Different cultures.
Different geographies.

But all possessed unusually high levels of collective ambition, institutional adaptability, productive energy, and confidence in the future.

Civilizations rise when they believe tomorrow belongs to them.

That confidence matters more than most people realize.

Because great societies require frontiers.

Not merely geographic frontiers, but technological, industrial, scientific, and civilizational ones.

Advanced manufacturing.
Artificial intelligence.
Energy abundance.
Space systems.
Biotechnology.
Defense production.
Ocean infrastructure.
New forms of computation and automation.

Civilizations stagnate when they lose meaningful frontiers.

And the defining competitions of the coming century are ultimately competitions in vitality.

Not simply military competitions.
Not merely economic competitions.

Civilizational competitions.

Which societies can still build?
Which can innovate faster than bureaucracy accumulates?
Which can sustain industrial capacity?
Which can attract ambitious people from around the world?
Which can maintain social cohesion during technological disruption?
Which can preserve institutional competence across generations?

Deterrence itself is downstream of vitality.

Military power ultimately rests on deeper foundations:
industrial energy,
technological innovation,
social trust,
productive capacity,
and civilizational confidence.

This is one reason I increasingly believe the central challenge facing the United States is not simply economic, political, or even military.

It is whether America can remain a high-vitality civilization in an era of institutional distrust, demographic pressure, technological acceleration, and rising global competition.

America’s Strengths

The good news is that America still possesses extraordinary reservoirs of vitality.

This is important to say clearly because modern discourse often oscillates between naïve triumphalism and performative decline rhetoric.

America remains one of the most innovative societies in human history.

Its universities continue attracting global talent.
Its entrepreneurial culture remains uniquely aggressive.
Its capital markets still finance enormous technological risk.
Its geography remains extraordinarily favorable.
Its energy position is strengthening.
Its military-industrial ecosystem, while strained, still contains immense latent capacity.
Its culture still produces individuals willing to reinvent entire industries from scratch.

Most importantly, America still retains something many civilizations quietly lose:

The belief that reinvention is possible.

That belief is a form of civilizational confidence.

And civilizations survive not merely through accumulated wealth or inherited power.

They survive through regeneration.

The Future Belongs to Builders

Through the continuous production of ambitious people, competent institutions, productive industries, meaningful frontiers, and national purpose across generations.

Healthy societies generate surplus energy faster than institutional entropy can consume it.

That may ultimately be the real test of national vitality.

Because history does not reward societies that merely preserve themselves.

It rewards those still capable of creating the future.

The civilizations that endure are not necessarily the richest or the strongest.

They are the ones that remain alive enough to build what comes next.

Public Service Should Be a Tour of Duty

Why I Resigned from the Pentagon

Note: After six months of service at the Pentagon, I concluded my planned tour of duty and returned to the private sector. This essay reflects on why I believe more Americans should approach public service in the same spirit.

For much of American history, public service was not meant to be permanent.

Farmers served in Congress and then returned to their land. Business leaders stepped into government during national emergencies and then went back to building companies. Engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs contributed their expertise when the country needed it most.

Public service was understood as a tour of duty, not a lifelong profession.

In recent decades, Washington has drifted away from that model. Too often, politics has become a permanent career. One where the incentives increasingly reward staying inside the system rather than bringing fresh experience into it.

But the United States benefits enormously when people move between the private sector and government service. Institutions stay connected to the real economy. Policymaking remains grounded in practical experience. And innovation moves more quickly into the places where it matters most.

That philosophy is what brought me to the Pentagon.

I entered government service with a clear intention: serve for a defined period of time, contribute where I could, and then return to the work of building in the private sector.

The Department of War sits at the center of a historic moment in American national security. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, cyber capabilities, and advanced manufacturing are reshaping the global balance of power. Maintaining American leadership in this environment requires not only strong military institutions, but also a close connection to the innovation ecosystem that drives technological progress.

That connection does not happen automatically. It requires people who have spent time building companies, designing systems, and solving problems outside the walls of government.

Entrepreneurs, engineers, and operators bring a different perspective into institutions. They tend to ask how quickly a problem can be solved, not simply how it can be managed. They focus on execution. They measure success in results.

Those instincts can be useful inside government. They are especially especially useful in institutions responsible for protecting national security.

My time serving at the Pentagon was brief, but it was deeply meaningful. Working alongside the professionals responsible for safeguarding the country provides a perspective that is difficult to gain from the outside. The seriousness of the mission, and the dedication of the people carrying it out, is something every American should understand more fully.

But short periods of service can be powerful precisely because they are temporary.

When people know they will eventually return to the private sector, they bring urgency with them. They remain connected to the industries and technologies shaping the future. And when they leave government, they carry valuable institutional knowledge back into the companies and organizations where innovation continues.

This kind of circulation between sectors can strengthen both sides when done correctly.

Government benefits from fresh ideas and practical expertise. The private sector gains a deeper understanding of national priorities and institutional realities. The result is a healthier relationship between American innovation and American statecraft.

More importantly, it prevents the government bureaucracy from becoming a closed ecosystem.

Washington does not suffer from a shortage of career politicians. What it often needs are more people who have spent their lives actually building things.

That is why I believe more Americans (especially builders, engineers, founders, and operators) should consider temporary service inside government.

A six-month tour.

A year of service.

Perhaps two.

Enough time to contribute meaningfully. Not so long that the connection to the real world disappears.

The United States has always been strongest when its institutions remain connected to the energy and creativity of its people.

Public service should be one expression of that connection rather than a permanent destination.

For me, that model remains simple.

Serve when needed. Build when finished.

And when the country calls again, step forward once more.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did Justin Fulcher resign from the Pentagon?

Justin Fulcher resigned after completing a planned six-month period of public service.

How long did Justin Fulcher serve at the Pentagon?

He served six months.

Was Justin Fulcher forced to resign?

No. His service was always intended to be temporary.

Why did Justin Fulcher leave government?

Fulcher has said he believes more entrepreneurs and builders should temporarily serve in government and then return to the private sector to continue building institutions and companies.

America’s Defense Budget in 2030: $2 Trillion or $20 Trillion?

By Justin Fulcher

Recently President Donald Trump put a blunt marker on the table: a $1.5 trillion military budget for FY2027. 

Washington instantly turned it into a culture-war argument with cheers from one side and panic from the other. But the real question isn’t whether $1.5T is “too big.”

It’s whether it buys the one thing money is supposed to buy in national defense:

time.

Because by 2030, America’s defense spending is heading toward one of two worlds.

The Two Futures of America’s Defense Budget

In the first world, the U.S. spends in the low trillions (call it ~$2T) to build serious peacetime capacity: real munitions stockpiles, shipyards that can build and repair at speed, resilient space systems, and logistics designed for a contested Pacific.

In the second world, deterrence fails and the budget stops being a policy debate. It becomes a wartime invoice. That’s where you get numbers that sound absurd until they aren’t.

We have a historical reference for “absurd.” In 1943 and 1944, the United States devoted more than 40% of GDP to national defense. 

So if people scoff at a “$20 trillion” future, they’re missing the point: the exact number is less important than the order of magnitude. When a country is replacing lost ships, expended missiles, boosting space capability, and paying the premium for emergency contracting, the bill explodes.

Here’s the uncomfortable part many analysts miss:

The defense budget is not necessarily a measure of strength, but rather a measure of timing.

A massive wartime budget doesn’t prove seriousness. It proves you were late.

Why Throughput Wins Wars

A Pacific war likely would not be a clean “high-tech” duel that ends quickly because we have better software. It would likely be a throughput war (replacement, repair, sustainment) across a contested ocean.

Missiles fired faster than they can be produced.  Ships damaged faster than they can be repaired.

Satellites degraded and reconstituted in a brutal cycle.  Supply lines contested from day one.

And throughput is the one thing you cannot easily surge on demand. You don’t emergency-appropriate your way into dry docks, trained welders, or rocket motor capacity.

That’s why President Trump’s number matters and why he and Secretary Hegseth deserve credit for forcing a real conversation. Not about “strategy documents.” About whether America can actually build. Money only matters if it changes incentives. If contractors are rewarded for speed, scale, and repair capacity, then deterrence strengthens. If not, then nothing changes.

This administration has correctly shifted the focus from rhetoric to production. The “Arsenal of Freedom” tour underscores that deterrence begins in shipyards and factories, not conference rooms. The next step is scale.

But here’s the standard: a bigger topline is worthless if it doesn’t change output.

If $1.5T becomes a larger version of the same procurement machine of long timelines, exquisite one-offs, process theater, then it won’t deter anything. It will just cost more.

If it becomes an industrial reboot, it can actually reduce the odds of war.

“America First” has a defense-industrial meaning: build it here, buy it here, deliver it on time.

Deterrence is a factory.

The Real Test of a $1.5T Budget

So the test for Trump’s $1.5T is simple and measurable:

• Are we producing long-range munitions at scale, on multi-year contracts?

• Are shipyards expanding capacity and cutting turnaround times?

• Are we hardening and diversifying space and undersea infrastructure so the force can fight through hits?

• Are we fixing the logistics backbone?

• Are we writing a real mobilization playbook now, before the emergency, so speed doesn’t become a feeding frenzy?

If the answer is yes, then $1.5T isn’t reckless. It’s insurance.

If the answer is no, then America isn’t buying deterrence. It’s just getting used to bigger numbers while drifting toward the world where the bill has another zero.

By 2030, the defense budget will tell the story either way.

We will either pay to prevent the war.

Or we will pay because we didn’t.

As George Washington observed, “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.”

Every Founder Eventually Goes to War

Managing Conflict Isn’t a Phase, but the Job

The moment you realize you’re in a fight is rarely dramatic.

It doesn’t happen during a shouting match or a slammed door. More often, it arrives quietly—in a short email, a neutral calendar invite, or a lawyer copied where one didn’t used to be. The language is polite. The tone is professional. Nothing is said outright.

But something has shifted.

The incentives no longer line up. The assumptions that once held the relationship together no longer apply. And you understand—sometimes with a clarity that’s almost physical—that this relationship is no longer governed by trust, but by leverage.

This is the moment most founders misread. They assume they’ve done something wrong. That conflict represents a failure of leadership, communication, or values. That if they had chosen better partners, written better documents, or been more persuasive, this wouldn’t be happening.

That belief is comforting. And mostly false.

Conflict is not a deviation from entrepreneurship. It is one of its core outputs—and one most founders are structurally unprepared to manage.

⸻

Conflict Is Structural

Founders bring together a volatile mix: capital, control, ambition, time, and uncertainty. Each behaves differently under stress. Early on, they align easily. Everyone is optimistic. The stakes feel distant. Decisions are reversible. Trust is cheap.

As the company grows—or simply persists—those conditions disappear.

Capital seeks protection. Control seeks clarity. Ambition seeks acceleration. Time compresses. Uncertainty hardens into consequence. What once felt like shared purpose fractures into competing priorities.

This is not because people are dishonest. It’s because incentives diverge as reality asserts itself.

Early harmony is not proof of alignment. It’s proof of low stress.

Every startup increases pressure. Pressure reveals fault lines. Conflict is the result.

⸻

The Three Wars Every Founder Fights

Over time, most founders find themselves fighting some combination of three wars.

I’ve seen founders realize this sitting in conference rooms where everyone is nodding—and no one is agreeing. The slide deck moves forward. The meeting ends on time. And afterward, three different people summarize the “decision” three different ways.

1. Internal wars

These are the conflicts founders expect the least and feel the most.

Co-founder relationships degrade not because of malice, but because of asymmetry—of effort, recognition, risk tolerance, or reward. Early sacrifices are remembered differently. Contributions are reinterpreted through the lens of later outcomes.

Authority becomes ambiguous. Titles lag reality. Decision rights remain implicit long after they should be explicit. What was once collaboration becomes negotiation. What was once trust becomes accounting.

These conflicts are uniquely painful because they involve shared history. You’re not just disagreeing over strategy—you’re renegotiating the meaning of the past.

2. External wars

External conflicts feel cleaner, but they’re often more dangerous.

Partners reprice risk midstream. Regulators discover a category after it already exists. Counterparties weaponize process when outcomes turn uncertain. Competitors use rules as tools rather than constraints.

These conflicts are rarely personal. They are rarely fair.

Institutions optimize for risk minimization, not justice. They prefer clean narratives to complex realities. And they often shift the cost of ambiguity onto the most visible actor—the founder.

3. Psychological wars

This is the conflict no one prepares you for.

At some point, the mission itself becomes contested. The story you tell yourself about why you started no longer matches the reality you’re navigating. The company you built now contains forces you don’t fully control—speaking in your name, shaping outcomes you didn’t intend.

Your identity becomes entangled with a system that is no longer purely yours.

This is where founders burn out—not from overwork, but from moral exhaustion.

⸻

Why the Founder Myth Breaks Down

Popular culture trains founders to believe that vision, grit, and charisma are sufficient to overcome any obstacle.

This works until it doesn’t.

Vision does not confer authority.

Charisma does not create leverage.

Moral certainty does not translate into institutional power.

And being the founder does not mean the system will protect you.

When conflict escalates, the terrain changes.

The rules are no longer informal. Outcomes are shaped by contracts, procedures, timelines, and incentives that were invisible during the building phase.

Many founders experience this shift as betrayal. In reality, it’s a phase change.

Entrepreneurship rewards builders. It eventually tests governors.

⸻

What Actually Wins Wars

In founder conflicts, the objective function changes. The goal is no longer optimization—it is survival with options intact.

Founders often ask how to win conflicts. This is the wrong framing.

Victory is rare. Survival is achievable.

In real founder conflicts, righteousness is rarely decisive. Speed is often counterproductive. Aggression tends to escalate costs. The most reliable advantages are quieter:

• Time — the ability to wait when others can’t

• Clarity — knowing which battles matter and which don’t

• Optionality — preserving multiple paths forward

• Restraint — understanding when escalation destroys more value than it creates

The founders who last are not the most combative or the most idealistic. They are the ones who recognize that staying solvent—financially, reputationally, psychologically—is often the real win.

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The Skill No One Teaches

Entrepreneurship education focuses heavily on creation: product, market, growth. It spends almost no time on dissolution, renegotiation, or conflict containment.

Yet these are not edge cases. They are recurring patterns.

Founders eventually learn (often painfully) that:

• Some relationships end without resolution

• Some disputes are not about truth, but about leverage

• Some outcomes must be accepted, not fixed

• Silence can be strategic

• Escalation is rarely reversible

These aren’t lessons. They’re laws. Violating them makes you fragile.

⸻

Planning for War Without Becoming One

To acknowledge that conflict is inevitable is not to become paranoid or adversarial. It is to design with reality in mind.

That means:

• Making incentives explicit early

• Clarifying authority before it’s contested

• Designing exits before they’re needed

• Separating identity from outcome

• Assuming stress will reveal differences—and planning accordingly

Every founder eventually goes to war.

The ones who endure are not the ones who deny it, nor the ones who relish it.

They are the ones who understand the terrain—and move through it without illusion.

America is a Superpower Running on Legacy Software

America isn’t declining. It’s underperforming, because its institutions can’t match its capabilities.

By Justin Fulcher

I was standing in a Pentagon conference room when a Colonel leaned over the table and said something you never want to hear about the world’s most powerful military:

“We don’t lack technology. We lack tempo.”

Two days later, a veteran I know waited nearly three months for a routine medical scan. In the same week, an American defense startup deployed an autonomous drone that could identify targets faster than their billion-dollar legacy competitors.

That contrast captures America’s moment with uncomfortable clarity:

We are a superpower running on legacy software.

America isn’t declining; it’s underperforming. 

We still dominate the frontier. American firms lead in AI, biotech, space, and advanced computing. The ongoing debate over Nvidia’s H200 chips shows that American technology still yields a comparitive advantage so strong it’s viewed as a national security threat. Even China’s chip manufacturing industry – despite heavy government subsidies and intellectual property theft – is years away from our caliber of compute. Our GDP share has held steady for decades. Even the poorest U.S. state’s GDP per capita is on par with Europe’s richest countries. 

If America were truly fading, the world would be voting with its wallet and feet. Instead, it is voting for us. Look no further than how many countries raised their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP after the U.S. asked. All while remaining the top landing spot for foreign direct investment, surpassing the second highest destination by over 100 billion dollars.

The issue is not national decline; it’s institutional drag.

Across government, healthcare, defense, and infrastructure, our core systems operate as if it were 1975. We can field autonomous targeting drones, but we can’t process a passport in under 11 weeks. We can design next-generation hypersonic systems, but we can’t build a bridge without a decade of paperwork. Agencies are buried in compliance while their missions fall behind.

The world hasn’t passed America. Our institutions have just slowed us.

And that is a far more solvable problem. Here’s what can and should be done to bring our systems up to the speed of our capabilities.

America’s fundamentals remain unmatched.

Look at the country as an outside strategist would.

No rival combines our technology base, energy capacity, agricultural abundance, financial depth, global alliances, manpower, and influence. The U.S. remains the only nation capable of projecting power, deterring adversaries, driving innovation, and sustaining a global economic system.

These are not the traits of a collapsing nation.

They are the traits of an underutilized one.

A country this strong has no excuse for institutions this slow.

Our challenges are real, but completely fixable.

Institutional stagnation is not destiny. It is the result of outdated processes, siloed agencies, and a lack of mission alignment.

Other nations have rebuilt their state capacity before: Meiji Japan, postwar Germany, early Singapore, and even the U.S. during WWII and the space race. Renewal came from clarity of purpose and streamlined execution.

That same spirit still exists today, except we have tools those eras never did:

• AI to accelerate government workflows

• edge computing that secures critical infrastructure

• reshored manufacturing that strengthens national resilience

• digital health systems that widen access

• defense innovation that restores deterrence

If we want to restore American strength, modernizing our institutions is nonnegotiable. It is the decisive strategic advantage.

America’s biggest victories in the coming decades will come not from expanding government, but from upgrading it - rapidly.

Our renewal mechanism is stronger than any rival’s.

China can mobilize quickly, but it cannot self-correct.

Europe manages consensus well, but cannot scale innovation.

Russia can coerce, but not compete.

America’s weakness is something far easier to fix: institutional latency.

And unlike our competitors, we possess a civic superpower:

We reinvent ourselves - dramatically, decisively, and often exactly when others think we’re done.

American pessimism has been wrong for 200+ years.

It’s wrong again now.

Where We Go From Here

This is not a left-wing or right-wing project.

It is an American project.

Everyone benefits from:

• a government that works,

• a healthcare system that delivers,

• a military that moves with speed,

• secure borders and resilient supply chains,

• infrastructure that actually gets built,

• institutions that earn public trust.

Competence isn’t partisan. It’s patriotic.

America doesn’t need a miracle. It needs modernization.

If we refactor legacy processes, recruit technical talent into civic service, unleash American energy, accelerate procurement, deploy AI for state capacity, and rebuild our defense industrial base with urgency, the U.S. will enter a new era of national strength.

America is not a nation in twilight. America is a nation between chapters.

And the next chapter begins the moment we choose tempo over drift, capability over complacency, and renewal over resignation.

America still has the talent. America still has the tools. America still has agency.

Now we need the tempo.