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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.
Well, I don't have hard proof but if you followed the link it would have pointed you in the direction of evidence. Here's the TWZ write-up: https://www.twz.com/news-features/is-the-u-s-dropping-anti-tank-mines-to-stop-iranian-missile-launchers
Yeah, because the US decided to try Eagle Claw again, and Iran's air defenses were so leaky that SOCCOM (presumably sharing Kel-tec's stash at this point) correctly assessed that they could move a pair of slow C-130s nearly 100 miles inland without Iranian air defenses doing anything about it.
The public understanding is that the F-15E was hit by a MANPADS, which generally cannot reach jets flying at their service ceiling. Given that the A-10 made it all the way out of Iran before the pilot had to punch out, and that the F-35 likewise made it back (so technically, 2 shoot-downs for Iran, worse than Iraqi performance for the first three days of ODS) my guess is that small missiles, possibly MANPADS, were being used here as well, although airplanes can be pretty darn tough.
And remember the footage of that Hornet dodging a small missile (because it had been strafing an Iranian coastal area)? That looked like a MANPADS, too. And that was on March 25, at which point the Navy had allegedly been doing this for weeks.
Which suggests to me that the Iranian area air-defense network was pretty much gone by then.
My theory is something like "the US wiped out a lot of Iran's major force assets and they just...didn't surrender, which 'wasn't supposed to happen.'" Your options at this point are:
I think that's a perfectly cromulent explanation for what happens next.
I am not saying, by the way, that losing a couple of aircraft wasn't an Event, and it's quite possible that that had a tremendous influence on Trump's decision making process. But "we hit a single aircraft by luck, camped the location, and tagged another" is a perfectly good accounting of that event that is congruent with Iran's IADS being mostly suppressed and them relying largely on MANPADS and other small, portable IR systems (as you described) for defense at this point.
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