The POM is In

The Air Force this week presented its Fiscal 2015 program objective memorandum—the service’s five-year spending forecast—to Pentagon acquisition executive Frank Kendall, said Richard Lombardi, the Air Force’s deputy assistant secretary for acquisition integration, on Thursday. The presentation took place on Sept. 24, he told attendees of his AFA-Air Force Breakfast Program speech in Arlington, Va. Lombardi said he went into the meeting with Kendall “apprehensive” because the POM contains “a lot of risk” in terms of programs that the Air Force is drastically scaling back, or those it will have to be execute with skinny margins. However, Kendall didn’t blink; the team at the Office of the Secretary of Defense “understood that tough decisions had to be made,” said Lombardi, and the mood in the room was that the Air Force could do what it needed to do unless “anyone [had] any better ideas.” The Air Force actually built two POMs, said Lombardi: one assuming a two-percent reduction over the Fiscal 2014 President’s budget, and one taking nine percent. Service officials figured out the latter first, then put items back to achieve the two-percent version, he said during the Sept. 26 event.