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My link is by sortie rate, yes.
No, we have good reason to believe that they (or possibly IDF) aircraft were doing it on March 26 (this is ignoring that the US flew B-2s and a ton of escorts deep inside Iran to hit Fordow in the summer of 2025) because of the complaints about the mines in Shiraz.
Just outside of the week, if you toll from the 26th as a minimum start date for penetration bombing. Much longer than that, if you toll from March 4.
Either Iran's air defenses are pretty bad (they hit all of three manned aircraft - for reference, the Iraqis got three manned aircraft on the opening day of Desert Storm, and the day after that, and the day after that, too) or US ISR is so good that it just routes US aircraft around them nearly infallibly. (Or your theory is true and all the photos of aircraft with JDAMS on DIVIDS are just for show.) It wouldn't really surprise me if US ISR (and ability to communicate it to forces in theatre) has improved considerably since ODS and that is playing a large role here.
Well, keep in mind that military planners like to use test out their equipment in live conditions and should always be expected to fire a certain number of munitions
for funjust to make sure they work.I'd appreciate if you actually provided hard proof of this but I'll take your word for it. Regardless, I don't see the difference of one week or two as being particularly significant in this case, and if it began when Hegseth claimed then presumably there would be hard evidence as is the case with the bridge. Perhaps they began using bombs on March 4 to hit the fringes of Iran but that wouldn't quality as penetration bombing.
I'd break it into three stages.
At the beginning of the (pre-ceasefire stage of) war, the US almost entirely relied on standoff munitions to the point where you couldn't even find a photo of a plane taking off with bombs. Iranian air defense couldn't even conceivably hit anything because they were outranged.
In the middle of the war, the US began using JDAMs to hit the absolute fringes of Iran, like Tabriz and Bandar Abbas. This is when Iran's ambush-posture IR air defenses began actually scoring hits on manned fighters, like the F-35 earlier in March. Nevertheless, modern jets are designed with plenty of cameras to detect any incoming fire so that particular F-35 was unlucky; they were either caught in a blind spot or they happened to fly right past a loitering 358 missile.
At the end of the war, CENTCOM started to try to actually penetrate into Iranian airspace to drop bombs and either within the week or by the end of the week the US lost multiple planes in a day, and then lost six more in the subsequent rescue mission. At that point it became clear that you can't fight a "low cost" war with Iran; you can accept failure and leave, you can accept a much higher casualty rate to sustain the bombing campaign without massive use of standoff munitions or you can waste the entire global stockpile of said munitions and wind up in the same place a few months later. Judging by the repeated urgent leaks coming from every which direction on catastrophic stockpile shortages it seems Trump chose the third.
If my story is true then it makes perfect sense that Trump immediately cut his losses and has been desperately searching for an offramp whereas if your story is true then it makes no sense whatsoever that Trump agreed to a ceasefire instead of escalating the bombing.
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