Old School POMCUS Stocks

[kairos12]

POMCUS-Prepositioning Of Materiel Configured in Unit Sets)

During the Cold War unit sets of equipment were pre-positioned to that Divisions returning to the West Germany has ready sets of equipment that can be used immediately. That included command posts, tanks, artillery, engineering equipment, bridging units, helicopter strike units, artillery prepositioned, etc.

Given that Pandemics are coming more in the future these stocks should be located in anticipated hot spots. Where medical euipment is pre-positioned to be immediately available. Not a central location, but scattered around the nation, The equipment should be taken out once per year and trained with. Maitenance people should be hired to maintain the euipment in tip-top share.

You don't have to get ready if you stay ready.

[Demonaut]

1. yes but do you expect this admins to act proactively, responsibly or sensibly?

[kairos12]

2. I speak in ideals, but live in the shitty Orange Anus world.

[DetroitLegalBeagle]

3. We already have this

The Strategic National Stockpile.

[link:https://www.phe.gov/about/sns/Pages/default.aspx|]

[kairos12]

4. Dispersal is my issue. Let's prevent another tinhorn dictator claiming the whole pile.

Disperse and put in local control. That's what rethugs are always screaming about anyway.

[Turbineguy]

5. They used to call that Civil Defense

The DoD does this sort of thing very well.

[Aristus]

6. When my tank crew arrived in the Gulf in 1991, we were issued a POMCUS tank.

Brand-spanking new. It had twelve miles on the odometer, and thirty-one hours on the engine.

[MineralMan]

7. In the mid 1970s, I worked for the county I lived in,

as a mechanic in its fleet garage. The county bought tires in wholesale quantities, and they were stored in a warehouse at an old WWII military base that was being used as a National Guard base. The county had several big warehouses on that old base. Mostly, nobody knew what was in them, though.

Once, when I was picking up some tires, I noticed a fenced off area in the warehouse. Being a snooping sort of fellow, I went to see what was stored in there. It was a complete military field hospital, complete with huge tents and pallets of supplies all boxed up and ready to be deployed. I asked around and discovered that it was part of a civil defense program from the past and that it had been stored there for decades.

I asked further about it, out of curiosity. Yes, people knew it was there and it was included in the County's emergency planning document. I asked, "Has anyone had a look at it to see what condition the materials are in?" "Hmm...I don't think so," the department head I asked said.

One of the things that was in that enclosure was a field generator unit, designed to power the hospital. Being a mechanic, I wondered about its condition, so I asked if we could transport it over to the garage and see if it was operable. Nobody objected, so we arranged to move it to the county garage and I started de-mothballing it in times when I wasn't too busy.

After about a week, I had the thing up and running. It needed new batteries, a complete oil change for the diesel engine, but little else. It was brand new, and had never been run before. It started up just fine, with a little preparation. So, I ran it long enough to empty it of fuel, and then made it ready to go back into storage. The batteries, though, were stored elsewhere.

As far as I know, that field hospital is still there, in that warehouse, and it probably still has not been thoroughly inventoried or checked. Would it be useful? I don't know. Since nobody still in the military has probably ever gotten that particular type of hospital set up and put into operation, my guess is that it is probably a useless thing. However, if they ever do use it, it won't take all that long to get that generator unit running. I put it in storage mode in a way that would only require new batteries and some fuel to fire it back up.