There is a version of this story that starts with a business opportunity. That version is true — there is a massive, underserved market in defense AI, and Fulcrum is positioned to lead it. But that is not where this started. This started with a problem that bothered Heath Dorn for twenty years: the people who protect this country are operating the most mission-critical systems in the world on technology that was written before most of their junior enlisted members were born.
That is not acceptable. And it is fixable. Fulcrum exists to fix it.
The Problem Heath Couldn't Stop Seeing
Spend enough time in and around program offices — watching acquisition cycles grind through years of requirements documentation, watching contractors bill millions of dollars to maintain systems nobody fully understands anymore, watching warfighters adapt their missions to the limitations of their software rather than the other way around — and you develop a very specific kind of frustration.
It is not frustration with the people. The program managers, the contracting officers, the sustainment engineers — they are doing hard work under real constraints. The frustration is with the system: a procurement architecture built for a world that no longer exists, combined with a technology debt so large and so old that it has become invisible. The debt is just the environment now. The legacy systems are just how it works.
Except the rest of the world didn't stop moving.
of DoD legacy codebases
sustaining unmaintainable code
on legacy C2 systems today
The systems running U.S. military command and control, logistics, maintenance management, special operations coordination, naval warfare, and missile defense were designed in an era before the internet was ubiquitous, before cloud existed, before AI was a practical tool, and in many cases before the officers now responsible for them had started high school. They were written in Ada, FORTRAN, COBOL, and C variants that the commercial software ecosystem largely stopped teaching a generation ago.
They work. That is the paradox. They are mission-critical precisely because they have been running long enough and have been tested hard enough that they are known quantities. Nobody wants to be the program manager who broke missile defense because they tried to modernize it. So nobody touches them. And the gap between what the warfighter has and what is possible keeps getting wider every year.
A Legacy System Is Not a Failure. Ignoring It Is.
Heath is precise about this. The problem is not that these systems exist. It is that we have no strategy for evolving them — for wrapping them in modern capability without replacing the trusted core, for giving AI agents access to the data and workflows those systems contain without rewriting them from scratch.
Every one of these systems holds decades of mission-critical logic. The Ada code running a missile defense tracking system encodes the hard-won understanding of engineers and operators who spent careers thinking about that specific problem domain. You do not throw that away. You modernize around it. You connect it.
The question that drove Heath toward founding Digital Transformations was this: what if you could give every one of these systems an AI-native interface without touching the underlying code? What if a program office could deploy an AI agent team that could read from a legacy logistics database, reason about it, generate recommendations, and hand those recommendations off to a human decision-maker — all through a secure, auditable protocol that the legacy system never needed to know about?
That question has an answer. The answer is MCP.
MCP: The USB Port for AI Agents
Heath's way of explaining Model Context Protocol to a program manager who has never heard of it is consistent: MCP is the USB port for AI agents.
Before USB, connecting a peripheral to a computer required knowing exactly what kind of device it was, what protocol it used, and whether your system had the right driver. Every connection was a custom engineering problem. USB changed that by creating a universal interface standard — any device, any computer, plug it in and it works. The device doesn't need to know anything about the computer. The computer doesn't need to know anything about the device. They just need to speak USB.
MCP does that for AI agents and the systems they need to work with. An AI agent that speaks MCP can connect to any MCP server — a legacy database wrapper, a modern API, a sensor feed, a document management system, a maintenance tracking platform — without knowing anything about the underlying system. The system doesn't need to be rewritten. It just needs an MCP server that exposes its data and functions in a standard way. Plug it in and the agent can use it.
This is not theoretical. The MCP protocol is open-standard, model-agnostic, and already deployed in commercial enterprise environments. What Fulcrum does is implement it at defense enterprise scale — with the security architecture, classification-level controls, audit trails, and Human-in-the-Loop gates that government environments require and that commercial MCP implementations were never designed to provide.
Named for a Warrior: The Story of Fulcrum Atwood
The name Fulcrum is not an accident and it is not a brand exercise. It is a deliberate tribute to a fellow Citadel alumnus whose career embodied the values Heath built this platform around.
His call sign — Fulcrum — was a fitting emblem: the pivot point on which force is multiplied. That is what Heath wanted this platform to be for program offices across the DoD: the pivot point that multiplies the force of every team that deploys it, connecting legacy systems to modern AI capability and giving warfighters tools that match their mission.
The Citadel connection runs deeper than a naming choice. It reflects a shared formation — a university that has produced military and civilian leaders across the defense and intelligence community for generations, built on a culture of discipline, service, and the understanding that the mission comes first. Heath brings that formation to every decision at Digital Transformations.
The Mission: Every Program Office, Connected
Heath's goal for Fulcrum is specific and measurable: every DoD program office that maintains a legacy system should be able to deploy secure AI agents that interact with that system, augment the work of the teams responsible for it, and produce outputs that are auditable, human-reviewed, and mission-effective.
Not after a five-year modernization program. Not after a full rewrite. Now, using the systems that are already running, with AI agents that speak MCP and a platform that handles the security architecture so the program office doesn't have to build it themselves.
Why This Moment Is the Moment
Heath has been watching defense technology for twenty years. He has seen waves of enthusiasm — enterprise IT modernization, cloud-first mandates, digital transformation initiatives — wash over the DoD and leave the deepest legacy systems largely unchanged. Each wave had something in common: it required the legacy systems to change. Cloud-first initiatives required migrating off legacy infrastructure. Digital transformation required modernizing the applications. And the applications were too mission-critical, too complex, and too poorly understood to migrate safely. So they stayed.
MCP is different because it does not require the legacy system to change. The adapter sits outside. The agent speaks MCP. The system keeps running exactly as it always has, and for the first time, AI can interact with it. The unlock is not technical — the technology has existed for years. The unlock is the emergence of a standard protocol that makes the adapter generic instead of bespoke.
That moment is now. MCP was released by Anthropic in late 2024. The defense AI ecosystem is moving fast. The program offices that deploy first will build reference architectures that spread. The contractors that can implement MCP integrations at IL5 will have a durable advantage that compounds as accreditation timelines keep new entrants at bay. There is, at this precise moment, zero competition at IL5 for AI agent orchestration.
What Heath Is Building and Who He Is Building It For
Digital Transformations LLC is a defense product company. Not a consulting firm. Not a systems integrator. A product company that happens to work in one of the most demanding, most regulated, most relationship-driven markets in the world — and that has the team, the relationships, and the architecture to win there.
Fulcrum is the product. The Citadel Network — the advisory and investor community Heath has assembled around this mission — is the strategic foundation. The IL5 accreditation pathway is the moat. And the warfighter is the reason.
Every decision Heath makes about the platform — what to build, what to prioritize, how to design the security architecture, which program offices to engage first — runs through the same filter: does this help a program office give their warfighters better tools? If the answer is yes, it moves forward. If it doesn't, it doesn't.
The technology is ready. The protocol exists. The pathway to IL5 is proven. The only question is whether the program offices that need this most will find it before the window closes.
Heath Dorn built Fulcrum to make sure they do.