Military targeting is made possible from GPS devices being attached to airborne items to track missile paths, bombing patterns and track aircraft flight patterns.
A cluster bomb pattern of smaller explosions would have been a more energy-efficient match to the target.
For mutual protection from enemy fighters, and to make bomb patterns dense, the planes were flown in dangerously tight formations.
Whole bomb formations had to drop their loads on the lead bombardier's command, and the inevitable small differences in timing and heading led to dispersed bomb patterns.
Flying with the 8th Air Force from England (1942 44), he became known for his development of advanced bomber tactics, including pattern bombing and the combat box formation.
Military officers and experts on terrorism said the bombing fit a pattern of recent strikes on water and oil pipelines and the Jordanian Embassy, although they emphasized that it was too early to uncover any connections among the attacks.
The documents described a nuclear-bombing pattern stretching from west of the Caspian Sea in the Soviet Union across southern Russia through Afghanistan and over to the China frontier.
The F.B.I joined the New York Police Department in a search for witnesses and surveillance video, and went back to the files to see if the bombing fit into a pattern of similar attacks, on the British and Mexican Consulates, in 2005 and 2007.
The bombing Friday "follows a pattern of unlawful attacks in Yemen by coalition forces over the past two-and-a-half years," Kristine Beckerle, Yemen researcher for Human Rights Watch, told VICE News.
But the pattern since the bombing began in the predawn hours of Thursday has been for most government buildings the Iraqis consider potential targets to be abandoned beforehand.
The pattern of bombing-chaos-bombing in Libya follows the same pattern as Iraq, which was largely free of al-Qaida members before the US invasion in 2003, only to see it become a terrorist hotbed for the group once the US military arrived, eventually leading to the formation of Isis.
