B-52 CEP in Vietnam

[pyro-manic]

You'd need one hell of a designator pod for that! I think GPS would be a better option for that number of weapons.

The biggest problem with "area bombing" now is: what aircraft are capable of it? There are only small numbers of heavy bombers left in service with an even smaller number of countries (US, Russia, China maybe, that's about it). Your average strike aircraft (Tornado, Mirage 2K, F-15E,  etc) might be able to carry 8 or so bombs of an appropriate size, so you'd need an entire squadron to carry out a decent area attack. Not really a practical proposition.

[PR19_Kit]

Fill a Herk up with medium size bombs, open the tail-gate and climb a bit, no probs.   

And almost everyone has Herks anyway. 

[Burncycle]

Today, it would be possible to build a small, cheap, GPS guided add on kit for what were essentially "dumb" bombs in the past.

That's all JDAMs are, kits that are added onto regular dumb bombs.  It ended up being cheap enough to produce in numbers and revolutionized things.

Fun thing to do would be to pattern the bombs as you suggested, each bomb having it's own little coordinate in a large grid pattern that would allow the most efficient effect on target (ie, each bomb "spaced" so that it's one effective blast radius away from the next bomb, and so on).

You could even drop entire grids of sonobouys from maritime patrol aircraft in one fell swoop if each had it's own little GPS and glide kits.

[rickshaw]

You'd need one hell of a designator pod for that! I think GPS would be a better option for that number of weapons.

Such a pod would only need to "flash" the coded laser signal on each designation point for a few milliseconds - just long enough for the bomb to recognise it and start gliding towards it.  You then repeat that every few seconds.  The laser doesn't have to continually remain painted on the designated spot.  Momentum does the rest (the bomb will keep flying towards the designated spot and won't drift far between lases).

The biggest problem with "area bombing" now is: what aircraft are capable of it? There are only small numbers of heavy bombers left in service with an even smaller number of countries (US, Russia, China maybe, that's about it). Your average strike aircraft (Tornado, Mirage 2K, F-15E,  etc) might be able to carry 8 or so bombs of an appropriate size, so you'd need an entire squadron to carry out a decent area attack. Not really a practical proposition.

The USAF during Vietnam would use RB-66 bombers to guide formations of fighter-bombers to their targets and have them drop on a signal when they had identified their target with it's radar.

[pyro-manic]

I meant more in terms of, who actually has enough aircraft? No air force other than the US, Russia, China (those three again) can realistically deploy more than a couple of squadrons' worth of aircraft at once, let alone on one single attack.