“They’ll never send an F-35 down into the weeds on a CAS mission.”
No, they probably won’t. I remember reading quite a bit about how the CAS missing was evolving and being performed over ‘stan and Iraq. There was a lot of CAS being performed by aircraft orbiting at altitude and using SDBs to hit ground targets rather accurately. Aircraft like F-16s and even B-52s were being employed to provide CAS in this manner. They didn’t expect or want them to get low and slow, no. They wanted them up high and out of MANPAD range dropping mini-munitions on machine gun nests, caves, hideouts, etc. as the targets were called in from the ground. Literal flying artillery. I think this is where the USAF sees CAS going. I also think deployable UCAVs will begin to play into the CAS role in the near future.