They taught you that your C1 or C7 (depending on when you were in) was a shoulder fired, gas operated, magazine fed rifle and so on, right? They did not go into weapons classification terminology, hence why you can't find reference to it. And why would they? You needed to know that it was a RIFLE and that was it.
I can only speak from thirty-three years full-time service in the British Army. But my first twenty years were spent shooting the SLR [the British version of the FAL].
It was always called a rifle.
The book about the FAL calls it 'FAL - the World's Battle Rifle'.
The inventor, Dieudonne Saive, and the makers FN, have always called it a rifle - the very name FAL, means light automatic rifle.
My official training manuals right here in front of me call it a rifle.
I had never heard the term 'battle rifle' but I read the words sometime in the 1980's, and understood it to mean an infantry arm that fired a full-size cartridge, rather than an intermediate cartridge like the Soviet 7.62x39.
Having mixed with real Russian and FSU troops on the ground during the Cold war and afterwards, I can tell you that they NEVER refer to the AK-series even as an 'assault rifle' - to them, the assault rifle is the WW2 German invention that bore the very name 'Sturmgewehr' - assault rifle.
The Swiss have/had the StG58 - their version of the assault rifle, that fired the full-size 7.5x55 cartridge, but it is intersting to see that its replacement is simply called a 'gewehr' - rifle.
Basically, to me, at least, an assault rifle is a short rifle or carbine that is designed to be carried by mechanised infantry who deploy or even fight from a MICV. As such it is compact and also shoots an intermediate cartridge.
Ahah! I hear you say, but what about our current crop of Western small arms - compact, fire a small cartridge and used by mechanised infantry.
OK, BUT the 5.56x45 was NOT designed as a military round in the fust place, but it began life as the .222Remington - a sporting RIFLE cartridge.
The argument will carry on, but ask the guys who use them what they call their guns. We never called the appalling SA80 an assault rilfe, and no Canadian soldier I ever met anywhere called HIS gun an assault rifle, nor did any American seviceman either. Even the ultra-compact Steyr AUG is STILL called the Army Universal RIFLE.
tac
