In the world of superpowers, it's military airlift capability that separates the world's two heavy hitters -- the United States and Russia -- from all the wannabe second division powers.

India and China are both building world power military forces with major air forces and navies. Both countries also are working hard on expanding their military industrial sectors. But both are still dependent on the United States, Russia and major European nations for many of their more ambitious systems.

Nowhere is this more true than in the area of heavy military transport aircraft, where both Delhi and Beijing still look to Moscow. When the terror crisis erupted in Mumbai, India's only national anti-terror squad had to use an Ilyushin Il-76 bought from Russia to transport the force from the capital.

As UPI's Andrei Chang has documented, Russia and China remain deadlocked over China's desire to buy large numbers of Il-76s and eventually to construct them for themselves. The Il-76 is one of an increasingly long list of first-class Russian weapons systems that the Kremlin has proved extremely reluctant to sell to China.

As a result, Chang reported, the Chinese are now exploring the possibility of buying the Antonov An-70 heavy air transports from Ukraine. But the An-70 has been plagued with development problems, and it remains extremely uncertain whether it can pose a serious sales challenge to the Il-76 in the international military air transport market.

In both exporting military transports and in providing the largest airlift capability for its own forces, the United States still reigns supreme. Around the world, the most numerous and still most popular military transport remains the ubiquitous and ageless Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules. C-130Js with advanced avionics are still coming off the production line for the U.S. Air Force.

The U.S. fleet of giant C-17 Globemasters is growing more venerable and is still unmatched anywhere in the world. This is exceptionally important because even for otherwise formidable, middle-class regular powers with impressive militaries like Britain and France, as for the rising Asian giants of China and India, a lack of large airlift capacity for rapid deployment of significant numbers of troops to trouble spots around the world remains a major Achilles heel.

China even has ambitious long-range plans to create air armies that theoretically could be deployed rapidly in friendly countries where Beijing's skillful, patient diplomacy and massive financial and industrial clout already have wooed friends and influenced people. But this ambition looks to be at least a decade off, possibly much longer, depending on whether the People's Liberation Army can finally buy off the shelf the aircraft it needs from Russia or develop its own successful assembly lines to home-produce them. Both options look unlikely in the near future.

The unrivaled U.S. military airlift capacity means that the United States remains the unrivaled giant, or Atlas, of NATO. Even when nations like Germany, Britain and France are willing and able to come up with significant numbers of ground troops to operate out of theater alongside the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan, they either are greatly limited by their small airlift supply capabilities or they are forced to rely on the U.S. Air Force, putting additional strains on the world's best, but enormously overworked, military airlift capabilities.

(Part 2: Investing in the infrastructure)