The announcement put as positive a spin as possible on Gass' departure, but reading between the lines makes it clear leaders at the parent companies felt a change was needed, said Teal Group analyst Marco Caceres.

"Gass hung his hat on ULA's track record of successful launches," Caceres said. But ULA looked complacent when matched against the dynamic Elon Musk, whose SpaceX will shortly begin competing with ULA for military space launches.

Caceres said he expects to see layoffs and a streamlining of ULA to find all possible cost savings.

"My sense is you're going to see at ULA a restructuring of some sort, because ultimately they're going to have to find a way to be a lot more competitive on price," he said.

The GSSAP satellites "could certainly be considered offensive," Defense News reported Marco Caceres, an analyst with the Teal Group, as saying. "Obviously, the US Air Force is primarily thinking of it as defensive or simply from a maintenance and repair standpoint. But if you have the ability to get close enough to other satellites to observe or repair or refuel, then sure, you could probably take them out."

Joel Johnson, an international-affairs analyst at The Teal Group, says Iran Air "has seven or eight ancient 747s that have been quietly maintained with needed parts by a European carrier over the years, with implicit approval of the U.S."

"I would be astonished if the French don't deliver both ships," said Joel Johnson, a defense trade consultant with the Teal Group.

An official at the French Embassy in Washington declined to provide comment beyond what Hollande said on Monday.
Bloomberg reports that the construction of the second carrier, called the Sevastopol, is roughly 75 percent complete and paid for.

Russia is buying the ships from France because it's cheaper and faster than having to design one on its own. In the original deal, signed in 2011, the two countries agreed that the first two ships would be built and completed in France, with a third and fourth ship to be built in Russia.

Johnson said France could refuse to provide technical assistance to build the follow-on ships for Russia but that beyond that, France would most likely stick to its original agreement. This is partly because France, like other European countries, can't afford America's idealism when it comes to defense exports.

"There's no European country that can support a defense industry without exports," Johnson said. "It's much more painful for them to cut off exports and antagonize a customer than it is for the United States."

Therefore, compared to the United States, France has a reputation as a "highly dependable arms exporter," Johnson said. France risks hurting that image if it reneges on its Mistral contract with Russia.

Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group, said airlines might be more proactive about avoiding hot spots, although he noted that there are very few areas where non-government militaries have weapons sophisticated enough to shoot down a plane.