Hanson spent 2 years persuading General Dynamics (nyse: GD - news - people ) to sell one near Chicago and 15 years of patient waiting before a smaller competitor in California agreed to sell another.

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General Dynamics (nyse: GD - news - people ), which built GeoEye-1, has had no problem with its last 10 satellites, while Boeing 's (nyse: BA - news - people ) Delta 2 Rocket, set to carry GeoEye-1 into orbit, has a track record of 70 successful launches.

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It was at that point that the powerful Henry Crown of Chicago became the biggest shareholder in General Dynamics, merging it with his sprawling construction supply business and beginning a six-decade relationship between GD and the wealthy Crown family that persists to this day.

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While Buffett was speaking in generalities, it got me wondering how ADM, GD, and EXC stacked up against my Buffett-inspired Guru Strategy, which is based on the approach Buffett used to build his empire (a strategy that Mary Buffett, his former colleague and daughter-in-law, disclosed in her book Buffettology).

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That hard-nosed, numbers-driven approach to deploying capital has consistently generated superior returns for GD shareholders over the past 15 years, which is why most of the other big players in the sector now emulate it.

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The BAE solution will offer that high-capacity signal along with the standard signal for the handheld and manpack radios GD is already producing and an older signal used by 200, 000 fielded radios that Exelis built.

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There will likely be a significant drop-off in demand for the munitions that the unit supplies to the Army and Marine Corps, but GD has built up a strong base of support in Congress for protecting its core vehicle franchises.

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