POMCUS

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POMCUS is a military acronym for "Prepositioning Of Material Configured in Unit Sets."

The POMCUS system kept large amounts of pre-position equipment in West Germany. In the event of war with the Soviets, soldiers could be flown in on commercial airliners to use this equipment. By the late 1980s, the plan had evolved to send three divisions over in the first week of a conflict, and one division per week thereafter.

Originally POMCUS sites were primarily simply guarded, fenced-in lots of pre-loaded, maintained vehilces and weapons systems ready to roll, although the precursor to POMCUS sites was an series of underground storage areas liberated from the Germans in Pirmasens and the outlying areas Husterhoeh Kaserne utilized to store combat-readied armor. During the late 1960s-1980s, the above-ground POMCUS facilities were updated into large aluminum-over-steel warehouses, which provided the benefit of less weathering and lower maintenance requirements for the systems stored in them, as well as providing first-line defense against EMP radiation which could affect the electronics in both the communications systems and the recently implemented solid-state ignition systems on some vehicles.