I can assure you from personal experience, Fort Irwin is far from incredible. :)

Usually pictures like this the user takes one good photo of the ground and adds the ground to the composite afterward.

Yeah, with 8 round magazines that will happen. Little less likely with 30 round mags and a 210 round personal load.

That selective fire also includes 3 round burst rather than full auto, which is what most of the US Army’s M4s and M16s have.

But…we don’t use the 7.62 in small arms.

Exactly. I spent 8 years in the US Army. Not once did I see an automatic variant of the M4 or M16. They would be mostly useless for anything other than indirect suppressing fire. The M4s and M16s have a 3 round burst selector but it is also pretty much useless and the only time I’ve ever seen someone use it or used it myself was to expend ammo quickly at the end of a range day so that we didn’t have to turn it in (because it’s a lot of paperwork to turn in live ammo rather than just spent brass).

I’ve never shot an AK so I can’t speak to their accuracy but as far as my experience goes, any light personal rifle would be worse off with an automatic fire option because everyone would want to use it and become less accurate, and they would burn through their personal ammo load incredibly quickly. Semi automatic with placed shots works far better. If we need to send some rounds down range, that’s what we have SAWs and crew served weapons for. Our training doesn’t really revolve around automatic weapon fire either, even when training specifically on automatic fire weapons (SAWs, 240Bs, M2s) we were trained to fire in short 3-5 round bursts, anything past that and you’re wildly inaccurate (and that’s on a weapon with a bipod/mount).

So I guess my best answer would be, if we don’t arm your average infantryman with an automatic weapon now, that’s probably why they didn’t want to back then either.