US Army Forming 'Low-High' Budget Plans | Defense News | defensenews.com: Amid continuing uncertainty over future defense budgets and potential budget caps, the US Army’s force development chief says he has made one five-year spending plan for sequestration and one for a reprieve.
Maj. Gen. Robert Dyess said the uncertainty over the long-range fiscal forecast has not only hindered defense firms’ planning efforts, but required his office to craft two versions of the service’s program objective memorandum: “POM low” and “POM high.”
Unsurprisingly, Dyess prefers POM high. Speaking Thursday at a Center for Strategic and International Studies forum on the future of soldier equipment, he called on the audience at the think tank to lobby against the budget cuts known as sequestration.
“I’d like to be able to say there is a steady stream of resources that are going to flow, or to tell industry what it looks like, but unfortunately I’m unable to do that,” Dyess said. “When Congress asks me what can we do for you, ‘Hey, you can take sequestration off the books.’ ”
While funding for soldier equipment is steady, with a slight increase in 2016 — under POM high — Dyess said he could protect funding for only science and technology research in POM low. Under that plan, 120 acquisitions programs across the Army are vulnerable, particularly the large ones, he said.
