Bob, you surprise me. You are normally a man of sage consideration, rather than hackneyed tropes. CAS is not the warfighter, that’s the job of DCom Ops. CAS is there to provide the strategic guidance for the whole organisaton. In a future that will be driven by cyber, uncrewed aircraft, autonomous lethality and (as ever) politics, I really don’t care whether our CAS has previously put his own pink body into an aircraft to fly in a previous conflict.
…and don’t start me on the fact that most aircrew only get to command significant numbers of people when they get to wg cdr. Engineers do that from day one!