For the record, as a guy with a Ranger tab and a CIB, a lot of the commentary on the "Blackhawk Down" page real makes my teeth grind.

I understand the double standard there.

Well, I didn't put any of the commentary there so I definitely mean no offense when referencing it.

Oh no. No worries bud. What I was getting at is that pedantic remarks such as what's on the Blackhawk Down page are really obtrusive and unnecessary.

If there's anything offensive in there, please feel free to edit the page accordingly.

We could just change it to "fired his rifle in burst" and leave the context up to interpretations. But military doctrine does train troops to only fire their rifles in semi and never in full auto/burst unless they're using a machine gun.

I would be surprised if that was true. In the British military you are taught to use full auto in a load of different circumstances. Suppressing fire, breaking contact, clearing rooms, fighting in trenches or other confined/close spaces, all of these are situations where even regular infantry are trained to use full auto with their rifles or carbines. If it is true that the US military tells soldiers never to fire in full auto then that is a waste of a capability of the weapon, like telling somebody that they can only use the long range aperture on their irons and are not allowed to flip to the large aperture.

Correction. The US military doctrine trains troops to not shooting rifles in full auto or burst in most situation. Today it's a little different from 20 years ago.

I don't know of the modern British military training. We have seen historically post WWII, the adoption of a semi-auto only FAL tells a bit of the MOD's mindset for their troops but what the bureaucrats want their troops and what the troops actually did is not the same.

The FAL semi-only thing was the classic reason of believing that troops would waste ammo for not much gain. However, the fact that the conversion to full auto was so commonly done in the field kind of goes to show that in some situations there is a need (or at least a perceived one by soldiers on the ground) to go full auto. And this was with full power 7.62mm guns rather than the relatively controllable 5.56mm guns of today.

That may be true, but every time full auto is ever brought up whenever I talk to the few friends I know in the military, they all say they've never fired their rifles in full auto/burst in combat.

Then they've never had to break contact in a complex ambush in southwest Baghdad.

Full auto is useful in certain circumstances.

The single, well aimed shot is a great thing, but not everybody gets the opportunity to be Bob Lee Swagger.