What is "pom" packaging in maven?

pom is basically a container of submodules, each submodule is represented by a subdirectory in the same directory as pom.xml with pom packaging.

Somewhere, nested within the project structure you will find artifacts (modules) with war packaging. Maven generally builds everything into /target subdirectories of each module. So after mvn install look into target subdirectory in a module with war packaging.

Of course:

$ find . -iname "*.war"

works equally well ;-).

pom packaging is simply a specification that states the primary artifact is not a war or jar, but the pom.xml itself.

Often it is used in conjunction with "modules" which are typically contained in sub-directories of the project in question; however, it may also be used in certain scenarios where no primary binary was meant to be built, all the other important artifacts have been declared as secondary artifacts

Think of a "documentation" project, the primary artifact might be a PDF, but it's already built, and the work to declare it as a secondary artifact might be desired over the configuration to tell maven how to build a PDF that doesn't need compiled.

Packaging of pom is used in projects that aggregate other projects, and in projects whose only useful output is an attached artifact from some plugin. In your case, I'd guess that your top-level pom includes <modules>...</modules> to aggregate other directories, and the actual output is the result of one of the other (probably sub-) directories. It will, if coded sensibly for this purpose, have a packaging of war.