I am a civilian ops bod that has strayed into this forum. I know several people who work as ops reps on the civilian aircraft on charter to the US Military. It is interesting to compare and contrast what they tell me about how the US does it and how the UK does it.
The USAF do not operate any dedicated passenger transport aircraft and a majority of troops on deployment will move on civilian aircraft. The business is a significant proportion of the income for airlines concerned and very important to the bottom line. I believe there are laid out contractual standards right down to how much catering there should be, how may films, which magazines should be available. I understand there is a system of penalty notices for failures to perform on time and to the agreed standards. Too many failure notices or a bad on time performance puts them on a last call list. Being on this list is bad news financially so they work very hard to avoid being on it.
The ops staff I know usually seem to know roughly where they are going about a month in advance so it could just be that the tasking office is better prepared than the UK MOD
As the old saying goes what get measured gets managed, I understand there are a lot of people from the USAF measuring so the airlines spend a lot of time managing. The outcome seems to be a lot less chaotic than the tails from this thread.