Reducing friendly fire incidents, a multidisciplinary approach utilising sport and biomotion

![CDATA[A significant body of research exists in sport science and biological motion that is applicable to military settings, particularly when examining combat scenarios where friendly fire incidents have occurred. Friendly fire incidents, or blue-on-blue, occur when a member of a coalition force is injured or killed by their own side accidently. This often transpires because the target has been misidentified or they have inadvertently moved into the line of fire. Additionally, friendly fire can include civilians as engagements are increasingly taking place in urbanized regions. Current research within the specific area of sport science known as skill acquisition (motor learning), in addition to a significant body of research within perception and vision domains, has provided a multidisciplinary foundation for the line of research which explores the ability of invasion sport teams to recognize their teammates when visual information is limited. Specifically, the findings of Steel and colleagues (2006-2015) show teammates can discriminate between friendly (teammates) and non-friendly (non-teammates) at rates significantly greater than chance regardless of motion form (swimming or running) and environmental context (familiar and non-familiar). Numerous biomotion studies investigating the characteristics of human movement suggest the ability to perceive biological motion is an evolutionary trait which allows affiliation or intention of others to be determined, thus increasing chances of survival. When viewed from a distance, an observer is afforded the chance to identify a person, understand their intention (friendly, threatening), which evokes an emotional response (has this person previously caused harm). Given the nature of invasion sports, where the objective is to invade the territory of others (which evolved from ritualised tribal warfare), there is potential to utilize these findings to develop a training program to increase the perceptual-cognitive skills of combat soldiers in order to decrease or eliminate friendly fire. This might be achieved by employing video-based training which improves a soldiers ability to recognize and identify friendly personnel from brief visual glimpses. Individual soldiers could be filmed in combat scenarios and the objective of training would be to improve the accuracy and speed of recognition. Further, this training could be adapted to improve the ability for personnel to differentiate between allies and hostiles in different environments, subject to deployment requirements at the time. Therefore, sport science and biological motion research have provided a foundation for findings to be applied to military contexts. Specifically, perceptual-cognitive training could be employed to reduce incidents of friendly fire. The life of a soldier and mission objective(s) is too valuable to risk friendly casualties, especially when combat involves varying levels of personnel in different environments across the globe.]]