In Action: Australian F88
The collection of photographs featured above show men of the 1st Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR) while deployed to Somalia in 1993. They were part of the Australian element of the United Nations peacekeeping force which included personnel from over a dozen countries. They were part of the US-led Unified Task Force and the UN-led initiatives United Nations Operation in Somalia I & II. The photographs show Australian troops on patrol in rural parts of Somalia as well as in Mogadishu. The UN operations continued from April 1992 to March 1995.
The troops in the photographs are armed with the a short stroke gas-operated bullpup ‘F88 Austeyr’, the first iteration of the Australian Army’s F88 series. In 1988, the Australian Army replaced it’s 7.62x51mm L1A1 (FALs) with the 5.56x45mm F88, a licensed version of the Steyr AUG made in Australia at the Thales owned Lithgow Small Arms Factory. The F88 has a number of changes from the original AUG. These include the ability to fix a bayonet, a disabling mechanism for the AUG’s two-stage fire selector trigger and M16A2-pattern rifling.
It is interesting to note that the troops in the photographs are invariably carrying the rifle with the folding foregrip up. The F88 remains in Australian service with a number of modular upgrades throughout the late 1990s and 2000s. In 2015 the Australian Army began issuing the Enhanced F88 (EF88) which features a raft of improvements to the original rifle.
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