I didn't want to weigh into this discussion since it's not my forte, but I do have opinions on it, so here they go.
CFL, you hit the nail on the head. In today's budget crunch we're constantly looking at similar fleets to save money, in a perfect world the issue shouldn't be saving money at the expense of getting the right equipment for the job. It's supposed to work just like you said, strategic airlift (C-17) to get the goods overseas, and TAL (C-130) to disperse them once they're over there. You're absolutely right, TAL should be able to operate from small unprepared airfields and be equipped with self defense suites (ie flares and chaff and even JATO if the situation dictates), strategic airlift doesn't necessarily need to be able to do that.
In my humble opinion, strategic airlift is one of the most important capabilities that we're lacking. With the amount of deployments we have going on, we have absolutely no way to get our guys and their equipment to the hot spots.
Cheers