U.S. fleets are among the oldest in the world, said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia. “I’m not really sure that people should read that much into that,” Aboulafia said. “From a safety standpoint, a lot of the older planes were built tougher and with proper maintenance, there’s no reason why a plane can’t stay safe for 25 to 30 years.” The U.S. and most of the developed world have superb standards and maintenance regulations, the result of decades of experience that have made the system incredibly safe, Aboulafia said.

The source code is "kind of the holy grail" for this, controlling everything from weapons integration to radar to flight dynamics, said Joel Johnson of TEAL Group, an aerospace consultancy in Fairfax, Virginia.

Boeing had been slated to manage the construction and installation of 10 ground-based interceptors in Poland that were part of the Bush administration’s original plans. “The losers are clear,” said Phil Finnegan, of the defense and aerospace research firm Teal Group. “Boeing was going to develop that site, and obviously that’s not going to happen.”

“There’s a different wind blowing in Washington,” said Phil Finnegan, a defense industry analyst at the Teal Group. He noted that many programs in which defense companies served as both advisers and architects have run into cost overruns and other problems. “What you saw in the past was a close relationship between government and industry,” he said. “The idea was: Trust the contractor with the ability to come up with the overall architecture and implementation of systems because they have so much capability.” But now there have been problems, he said. “There is a new attitude. There is not the level of trust of contractors you saw a few years ago.”

Engineers at the sprawling China Lake complex, one of the nation’s largest weapons test facilities with 6,600 workers, are hoping to be at the forefront. “We’re sort of at the same stage as we were in 1914 when we began to arm airplanes,” said Steven Zaloga, a military analyst with the Teal Group Corp. Pentagon officials say robotic planes have been particularly effective. As a result, demand for them has climbed sharply and Pentagon planners have rethought how they develop and deploy new weapon systems, analysts said.