POMCUS

POMCUS (Prepositioning Of Materiel Configured in Unit Sets) was a system that kept large amounts of pre-positioned U.S. military equipment in West Germany during the Cold War.

In the event of war with the Soviets, American soldiers could be flown with their take-along-with troops (TAT) gear on Civil Reserve Air Fleet commercial airliners to use this pre-positioned equipment. The equipment was set up in unit configurations to aid in force building and movement to support the US Army's general defensive plan (GDP). 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 vehicles and weapons systems ready to roll, although the precursor to POMCUS sites was a 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 benefits 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.