"Boeing is at a disadvantage in terms of next generation narrow body timing because Airbus is doing a great job with the A320neo," said Richard Aboulafia, aerospace consultant for Teal Group.

First delivery of the A320neo is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2015 to Qatar, while first delivery of the 737MAX is scheduled for the third quarter of 2017 to Southwest (LUV) .

"Airbus is going to get there the better part of two years earlier than Boeing," Aboulafia said. "The best thing Boeing can do is to catch up with them as soon as possible. In this high-fuel-cost environment, it's a game of availability; it's all about timing."

To replace those munitions, experts say, officials are likely to turn to Boeing Co. for a tail kit that converts an unguided free-fall bomb into a "smart" bomb through installation of a GPS-guided tail section.

The company has sold nearly 262,000 such kits, at $25,000 each, including thousands to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain.

"These coalition partners have already bought quite a bit of weapons from American weapons makers," said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with Teal Group Corp., a Virginia research firm. "After a campaign like this, they're likely to buy more."

The Air Force is making upgrades to the F-22 by adding better processors and newer fiber-optic data-buses, but the technology remains hopelessly obsolete compared to current-day consumer devices. Part of the reason for that is it is more difficult to predict how emerging technologies will develop. "Figuring out which technologies pay their way on a commercial product is generally easier than figuring out which technologies offer the best bang for the buck on a military one," said analyst Richard Aboulafia at the Virginia-based Teal Group.

The major driver of cost is flight time for warplanes and steaming time for ships — not missiles or bombs, said Richard Aboulafia, a military aviation analyst with the Teal Group. A warplane can cost at least $10,000 per hour to fly. "What clobbered us over the past decade wasn't procurement (of weapons)," Aboulafia said. "It was operations and maintenance."

Analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group interpreted the Marine Corps' comment as putting pressure on Rolls. "When you're in a sole-source situation and you're not happy with the price of spares and durability of spares, the best way to put pressure on the contractor is to imply that there could be competition in the future," Aboulafia said. "If [Rolls] could somehow combine lower cost with higher performance, that might be something [the Marine Corps] would really want, but on the other hand, it's not clear that's what's going on here."