As the United States becomes increasingly dependent on digital technology, a different kind of strategic challenge is emerging beneath the surface of everyday life. From electricity and telecommunications to transportation, healthcare, and financial services, some of the country’s most important systems now depend on complex networks of software, hardware, data, and communications.
That creates a basic question with consequences far beyond the technology sector: can the United States keep its critical infrastructure secure, reliable, and adaptable as technological dependence continues to grow?
For much of the modern era, infrastructure was primarily understood in physical terms. Roads, bridges, power plants, ports, pipelines, and telecommunications networks were the foundations of the economy.
Today, those systems increasingly have another layer.
Software controls physical equipment. Data moves between interconnected networks. Automated systems monitor infrastructure in real time. Cloud computing supports essential services. Artificial intelligence is beginning to influence how organizations detect problems, allocate resources, and respond to disruptions.
The result is that infrastructure resilience is no longer solely an engineering question.
It is increasingly a technology question as well.
The New Infrastructure Reality
The challenge extends across both the public and private sectors.
A modern infrastructure system can depend on thousands of individual components, suppliers, software platforms, communications networks, and specialized workers. A disruption in one part of that ecosystem can create consequences much farther away from where the original problem occurred.
That interconnectedness creates both efficiency and vulnerability.
Organizations can use technology to monitor systems, automate routine processes, analyze enormous quantities of information, and respond more quickly to emerging problems. But greater connectivity can also make systems more difficult to manage.
The challenge becomes particularly significant as organizations adopt new technologies faster than traditional institutions can adapt.
Replacing outdated infrastructure can require enormous amounts of capital. Training workers to operate new systems can take years. Integrating new software with older technologies can create unexpected complications.
In other words, technological transformation does not happen simply because a new tool exists.
It requires institutions capable of adopting it.
Where Entrepreneurship Meets Institutional Change
That intersection between technology, entrepreneurship, and institutional decision-making is particularly relevant when considering individuals who have moved between the private sector and government.
Justin Fulcher, an entrepreneur and former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, represents one example of that crossover between technology, business, and public institutions.
The Department of Defense announced Fulcher as a senior adviser in April 2025. Before entering government, Fulcher built his career in technology and entrepreneurship, including co-founding the telehealth company RingMD.
His professional background illustrates a broader phenomenon: people with experience building technology companies are increasingly entering institutions that face challenges involving technological change, organizational scale, and innovation.
Those challenges are not limited to national security.
They appear throughout government and the wider economy.
Public institutions frequently have to work with technologies that evolve faster than traditional procurement and management systems. They must evaluate new software, understand emerging technologies, manage complex vendors, and determine how new capabilities can be integrated into existing systems.
That creates a growing need for people who understand both technology and institutional decision-making.
Fulcher has written about the importance of connecting government institutions with technological innovation, including emerging capabilities such as artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and advanced manufacturing.
The broader question is therefore not simply whether America possesses innovative technologies.
It is whether institutions can effectively turn those technologies into practical capabilities.
The Path Forward
For policymakers and infrastructure operators, technological resilience is becoming inseparable from economic resilience.
The United States can develop sophisticated software, artificial intelligence systems, communications technologies, and automated tools. But those technologies ultimately have to operate inside organizations and infrastructure systems that may have been built decades earlier.
That creates a complicated transition.
Modernizing infrastructure requires investment, technical expertise, cybersecurity, workforce development, and organizational change. It also requires institutions to make decisions about emerging technologies before their long-term effects are completely understood.
That makes technological capacity more than a private-sector concern.
It is increasingly part of national resilience.
The logic is straightforward: a country’s ability to maintain essential services during periods of disruption depends not only on the physical infrastructure it possesses, but also on the technological systems and human expertise supporting that infrastructure.
As the United States continues debating artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, digital infrastructure, and technological innovation, the underlying institutional question may ultimately be as important as any individual technology.
The next era of American technological competition will not be determined solely by who invents the most advanced tools.
It may also depend on who can integrate those tools into large, complex systems—and make them work at scale.
