“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.
In the first Gulf War, F-111s destroyed a LOT of tanks.
Modern targeting pods make tank killing from 35,000’ possible.
That is not to say we’ll never again need someone down low doing the job, but Obama’s goal is to permanently cripple and destroy as much of the US military as he can in his remaining time in office.
But what do I know - they killed my bird, too (P-3s).
The people to ask are the grunts on the ground, pinned down under fire from a superior enemy force. We should ask them when they call in for DANGER CLOSE ordnance delivery would they rather talk to an A10 driver who can see them in the trees or would they rather have some airman dropping a few 500-pounders from 50,000ft. I think I can guess that answer.