That's a cute distinction to make, but if you ask the majority of infantry riflemen in modern armies about how often they use the automatic setting on their rifles, the answer will be rarely/never. 3 round burst is also very rarely used. For suppressive fire a fireteam will have an automatic rifleman with an M249. The overwhelming majority of use rifles on the M16 platform see in combat is semi-automatic fire. Their combat advantage over other long guns is magazine size (compared to a bolt action or 8-round clip), lethality of the round used (5.56 NATO, same as civilian ARs), accuracy, and ability to mount accessories. So here's an 'if a tree falls...' riddle for you: if the feature you use to discern military hardware from civilian hardware is never used by the military, does that distinction actually matter?