In the future, CAS duties should be handled by Rafale, possibly LCA and possibly UCAVs.
The image of brave troops being able to call down lethal air support 'just in the nick of time' is a myth. Using Rafale/LCA for CAS is a self-defeating proposition. Those aircraft would be much better used for interdiction strikes. Here's why.
Assume you have 96 Rafale/LCA/UCAV strike craft covering the area for a corps, and they can make a sortie every two hours (including travel time to and back, rearming, refueling, taxiing time). Further assume you have uncontested air superiority - your opponents cannot get anything into the sky, so you only need minimal CAP sorties (or can simply rely on short-range IR missiles on your strike craft for self-defense).
Assuming your pilots and ground crew don't sleep
and you lose nothing on each sortie to SAMs or AAA, over a 24 hour period that's 12x96 = 1152 sorties.
A corps will have 6 brigades, each of which has between five and ten battalions. Let's assume 8 combat battalions per brigade (@Ray please verify) for simplicity of calculation. That's 48 battalions, of which let's say half are engaged against an enemy formation or objective at any given time. So your 1152 sorties have to be parceled out across 24 battalions = 48 sorties per battalion each day, or 2 per hour.
Now let's think about the type of sorties your hypothetical air command is taking on in support of the army.
CAS sorties will be called down by battalion level commanders and below - likely company commanders designating tactical targets. Assume each CAS sortie can disrupt an enemy company, but the Army's targeting data only gets their positions right 1/4th of the time (this is in line with US data from the 2003 Iraq War). Assume further "strike overlap/overkill" of 50% - that means half of all your sorties are used up on enemy units that have already been bombed by another sortie (also in line with USAF estimates from Iraq and Serbia).
So now your 2 per hour per battalion becomes 0.25 per hour per battalion, divided even further among each of your four companies per battalion. In all likelihood, a given company is lucky if they have air support
once per day, and will only call targets at an average of 50% efficiency. Spreading resources out to the front lines like that will only produce mediocre results.
Airpower is only useful if wielded as a coordinated fist by a centralized authority - preferably division-level officers aboard a constellation of C4ISR aircraft like the Boeing E-3. Then those 1152 sorties you get per day can be used against properly identified concentrated targets (airfields and comms stations, armor formations trying to cross bridges deep behind enemy lines, etc.)
Sure, your field commanders won't be happy at having less sorties available to them, but your overall results will be much better. Military history has shown that war is exceedingly unkind to command structures that gift lower-level commanders with more assets than they can manage, and only mildly unkind to well-centralized command systems. Even the 'net-centric warfare' of the modern US, Russian, or Chinese armies relies on disrupting your opponent's ability to maintain rapid, centralized, and coordinated action while keeping up your own.