Army Special Forces Veteran Using Military Skills to Boost US Supply Chains

A former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who transitioned to the supply chain world is working to make U.S. on-shore manufacturing more viable than ever before.

Justin Baucum is among those working to replenish strained defense, aerospace and energy supply chains in an age of rapid technological advancement. Software is rejiggering how factories operate and are producing parts.

U.S. supply chains have faced cracks in recent years due to natural disasters, labor shortages, raw material shortages, and tariffs enforced by the Trump administration. The tariffs were implemented as a means of bringing back domestic manufacturing and bolstering the United States’ standing in ongoing trade battles with major adversaries like China.

“Overarchingly, as an industry, manufacturing to support defense and the critical industries is just continuing to decline,” Baucum told Military.com. “Over the last couple of decades, we've just eroded our capability and we've sent things offshore. A lot of folks that were good at making things are retiring, selling their businesses, moving on."

There hasn't been a big push to make things in the real world. It's been very software focused, like, go get a job with a tech company—nothing against tech companies, but if you don't have hardware, then the software doesn't really matter all that much.

U.S. Reps. Jill Tokuda (D-HI) and Neal Dunn (R-FL), members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, on Feb. 12 introduced the Rare Earth Magnet Market Revitalization Act intended to strengthen national supply chains, protect national security, and rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity for rare earth magnets.

Major investments are still happening across the country. John Deere, for example, announced plans to open a distribution center in Indiana and an excavator factory in North Carolina—with each location expected to employ more than 150 workers.

A Japanese plastic manufacturer, Sanko Texas Corp., plans to build a $40 million plant on a 43.7-acre site in San Antonio, Texas, that will serve as the company’s U.S. headquarters and could start hiring 100 workers by 2028, per San Antonio Express News.

Military and Real World Lessons

Justin Baucum spent roughly six years in the U.S. Army, originally joining around 2013 to be a Bravo infantryman. After graduating basic training, he came across a Special Forces recruiter while in transit to his first duty station and received the opportunity to try out.

It was a success, leading Baucum to his first Special Forces group up Fort Lewis, Washington, leading into a 3.5 year operational detachment that took him to Afghanistan and then Korea.

By the summer of 2019, Baucum was living in Washington State and attempting to figure out the next phase of his life and career. While going through an MBA program in Seattle, he looked into big tech jobs at Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

The former criminal justice major and Chik-Fil-A employee later received a job offer as an Amazon operations manager in one of their first fulfillment centers, calling it “a natural fit” based on his former role overseeing operations in both the fast food industry as well as in the Army.

“It exposed me prior to the military experience to, OK, this is something that I want to revisit—not necessarily in the context of a fast food chain, but I enjoy having my hands across the board, not necessarily like one specific focus,” Baucum said. “I think that's why doing the job that I did in the Army was a good fit because you get to do a bunch of different things in association with that role. 

“So, it was kind of in the back of my mind when I got out, but I just didn't know what kind of format that would take. Going to Amazon felt like, OK, I need to relearn some things of how the regular world operates. What place [is] better to learn operations and supply chain type stuff than a place like Amazon?”

The Missing Piece

Baucum has taken his learned lessons in service and business to Isembard, a company that builds precision components for aerospace, defense, aviation and energy through a network of modular, software-driven factories that deliver complex parts in days rather than months.

He began last May and became instantly interested after meeting briefly with CEO Alexander Fitzgerald, sharing a vision for the company that extended beyond their only office location in London at that time.

“It was a team of four people, one machine, and just big ambitions, basically,” Baucum said. “I was coming from a company where I had kind of an advanced director-type role, 3,000-person company, been there four years and was kind of living a really comfortable day-to-day, work-life balance."

But the piece that I was missing was that mission centricity that I had in the Army where there was no delineation between my life and the job. It was just, I am in the Army and everything gravitates around whatever it is, whether it's a training cycle, a deployment, whatever the case is. So, I’d been itching to have that same sort of focus again on whatever my day job was.

'Not Going to Accept Defeat'

Baucum was “sold” on the company immediately, being brought on to work as a general manager out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area and has more recently focused on U.S. expansion.

“There's a challenge with the rise of venture capital-backed defense businesses focused on anything from drones to AI-driven turret systems to hypersonic missiles,” he said. “We'll just isolate one kind of specific defense industry. The type of companies that are starting to emerge over the last couple of years are kind of challenging the legacy defense primes.”

Baucum attributed that to the speed of new product development coupled with the number of new, innovative companies that create products for deterrence and other purposes.

Isambard's focus for roughly the next 12 months is to increase the capacity shortage to support defense companies “because they have no real supply chain developed yet," Baucum added, saying that there’s a current “hodgepodge mix” of how parts are created, distributed and reasons for why they do not meet certain deadlines.

Being a military veteran has also been beneficial, Baucum said. It has forged some relationships that perhaps could have taken longer to flourish, though traditional means of doing business also remain critical.

“Something that I heavily rely on is just the philosophy of we're not going to accept defeat,” Baucum said. “We'll constantly be trying to mitigate risk wherever we can and to make ourselves successful. But ultimately, until we've exhausted every solution, we're not just going to settle.

“I feel like in this industry, you're so reliant on suppliers and vendors—material, tooling, the weather, working out, delivery schedules, things like that. I'm very understanding that you can't control all the variables, but you can definitely mitigate where possible.”

Other times, it takes some old-fashioned legwork.

“Sometimes, you just need to get on a plane and go get it,” he added.