The urban BCT would be different in other important ways than today’s BCTs, specifically in their organizational commitment to three principles.

Rapid experimentation, structure changes, and equipment fielding. The urban BCT will provide an organizational base for rapid experimentation, equipment fielding, and structural change. The unit would need advanced capabilities from Army and Department of Defense labs, academia, and industry. Many of the proposed soldier and unit enhancements, such as robotics, population mapping, sensors, scalable-effects weapons and munitions, and soldier and command networked communication and control systems, could all be inserted for experimentation and testing while training for megacity operations.

The proposed urban BCT structure, outlined here, is only a starting point. Brigade combat teams are force packages that have, as one of their core design principles, the ability to adapt to a wide range of environments. A megacity unit must be designed with a capability one step further—not only to evolve in response to our constantly refined understanding of the unique requirements of big cities, but to evolve rapidly to fit the needs of each city’s unique characteristics once deployed. Unlike existing units that conduct experimentation, such as the brigade that until recently was permanently assigned to the Joint Modernization Command, which must maintain their BCT organization, a megacity unit would need authorities to radically and rapidly change its organization. The unit would also need addition funding lines in its authorizations to support changes.

Unit personnel management exceptions to policy. BCTs are not only the Army’s building blocks, but also a key Army leader development tool. Almost every officer in a brigade is doing on-the-job training because he or she has never held that particular position before. This practice is a great strength but also takes away from unit performance. In the 75th Ranger Regiment, officers are accepted for a position only after successfully executing that position’s duties in a previous unit. The need for this unit to quickly develop a capability not resident in the Army today means that it should have a similar policy.

The unit would also need compulsory release authority. Lessons from experiments like the Network Integration Evaluation and different battle lab experiments show that some soldiers thrive with new weapons, technology, and multiple feeds of information; others do not.

Study group. The complexities of megacities and the dilemma of military operations within them have been studied by the Army since 2013. Operations in urban terrain more broadly have been studied multiple times before that. Wargames, conferences, writing contests, tabletop discussions, and experiments have been conducted. But not much has actually been done with the fruits of these efforts. For a megacity unit to constantly adapt based on ongoing refinements of our understanding of the domain, it needs a small, diverse group of permanently assigned experts committed to studying, learning, capturing lessons, and developing doctrine for megacities.