Were they semi-auto or full-auto versions?
“...While there were loads of excellent photos of aircraft and people there is one that caught and kept my attention. ... a line of Air Commando NCOs dressed in fatigues wearing their official Aussie-style hats (fold-up brim). The caption said they were on a small arms firing range shooting their AR-15 rifles.
This was a few years before wide-spread involvement in Viet Nam...” [Nip, post 14]
“Were they semi-auto or full-auto versions?” [Buffalo Head, post 16]
Footage of those Air Commando NCOs - bush hat and all - appeared last week on American Heroes Channel. Every shot was full-auto; they massacred small piles of cinder blocks.
Never heard of any AR-15-style rifle in US military use that was anything but select-fire (burst fire in the M16A2).
The footage in question was made before Colt’s began selling its semi-only clone dubbed the AR-15 (a trade name it purchased rights to, from ArmaLite).
There were three systems (at least) of nomenclature involved then: official DoD nomenclature, manufacturer nomenclature inside the factory, and marketing nomenclature the manufacturer used in material revealed to the public. They rarely match and sometimes overlap.
Just what official nomenclature was used by DoD to designate experimental and test rifles of what we now think of as the “M16 pattern” furnished to the military has not been brought to my attention.
Despite orders from the Secretary of Defense and other high officials, each branch of the armed services still uses its own internal nomenclature for some equipment. It was much more the case circa 1960, when each branch was still getting used to being subordinated to one single Cabinet Secretary, and still sorting out an administrative/bureaucratic legacy that dated back to 1790 at least.