"the growing military capabilities gap between the US and its European counterparts"
Its so easy to lose track of the importance of investing R&D and production costs into national budget, especially when the Umited States has been covering all your "big ticket" security items since the end of WW2.
Archetypcial: Canada's Disaster Response Unit - grounded and useless because no one had the foresight to look at lift capacity.
Europe was preparing its surrender to the inevitable invasion by the USSR. Imagine how disappointed they were when the USSR fell apart. ;')
Supply shortages after D-Day led within a few years to heavy airlift capability in the US. That helped Truman when he said (regarding the Berlin crisis), "we are going to stay, period." In the Yom Kippur War (1973), the US couldn't overfly European countries, or use their airports, with the exception of Portugal. Using the Azores, the US managed to out-airlift the USSR by a factor of more than two, actually I think it was nearly three times as much. The USSR had a much shorter route.
Among the things transported by plane were a dozen or so complete, ready-to-roll tanks, but mostly it was spare parts for tank and aircraft repair, and ammo. All of that was coordinated with the Israelis. Nixon (who spent a lot of nights hungover or drunk, during the Watergate crisis) had ordered the airlift, and when told that it would be difficult blah blah blah, said, "use everything that will fly."
I've read that Al Haig ordered TOW missiles shipped and that it pissed off Henry Kissinger. Can't find anything about that online. Read it onetime in one of those obsolete printed hardcopy things with the shiny covers. :')