Well i hope they put it a bit more poetically than that at the end... Finished with "There's only one of you, champ!" and a slap on the helmet, that's a good morale boost.

Two points come to mind, strictly from the perspective of an armchair general.

First, you need first class logistics as well as industrial capacity to run a doctrine of fire superiority continously over lengthy periods of time. If you can't supply your troops adequatly, suppressive fire becomes a luxury. Basically, industrial prowess allows you to sacrifice resources instead of soldiers. The Sowjets, on the other hand, had ample manpower reserves, yet limited logistical capacities, leaving human waves as a doctrine.

Second, I suppose it's much easier on your nerves to be "pro-active" about incoming fire than to just wait for an opportune moment. The vast majority of soldiers in major wars were civilians with comparatively little training. During the later years of World War 2, for instance, the difference between seasoned Wehrmacht divisions and reserve/Volkssturm units was enormous, despite acute ammunition shortage in the entire European theatre. Interestingly enough, even the replacement of bolt action rifles with semi-auto rifles such as the G43 didn't increase ammo consumption as much as one might expect.

Reminds me of a scene in Waltz With Bashir where guys a moving along in a vehicle convoy and they're just blasting away with mounted machine guns and one guy stops and asks "What are we shooting at?" and the other turns to him and says "I don't know, just keep shooting."

Yes, many hits are generated through sheer volume of blind fire. The other good reason to shoot in the general vicinity of the enemy, even if you can't see them, is that they're not going to stick their heads out and see if they can line up a good shot on you if there are bullets whizzing all around them. It also tends to pin them down, so hopefully you can bring in other units to flank them, while they are afraid to move.

The interesting historical note to this is, being Americans, the military overreacted to this WW2 problem of not shooting often enough, and trained soldiers to just pull the trigger. In Vietnam US soldiers expended one million rounds of ammo per confirmed hit. I've seen lots of footage of men in trenches blasting through magazines on full auto with their rifles pointing well over the heads of the enemy position.

Regardless of if it's correct in combat (I too would feel safer spraying down the dark corners with molten streams of hot death), the amount of munitions in general that are laid down blindly in modern warfare still amazes me.

http://nation.time.com/2012/04/02/bullets-by-the-billions/

Dats a lot o' shootsin'! Not to mention the environmental impact of throwing tons of lead into random shit, and the safety impact of unexploded ordnance. Kinda crazy.

I thought suppressive fire is standard military training. As a soldier, you are in combat like maybe 1% of the time during an actual war. Firefights are usually short. Its mostly waiting and patrolling and sleeping and more waiting. even in high-intensity wars like vietnam or WW2. More recent wars are even slower. So during those minutes or hours of actual fighting, suppressive fire is key to victory. It keeps heads down until backup/artillery/airstrikes can be called in. My combat training in the army was like 80% suppressive fire. I was in recon, so we mostly had fire-while-retreating scenarios where alternate halfs of a team fires and retreats.

I'm willing to bet that the environmental impacts take a backseat when you're in the middle of a firefight.

Heck, just playing paintball, I use the same doctrine...