Did you read the protest? https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/689544.pdf

The army asked for a radio that could transmit a signal itself. This company offered to build a radio that sends the signal (using radio over ip) to a truck or other radio system that would then transmit the signal. Their radio would not work if there was not another radio locally available to tether it with.

That's not even the same product. Cheaper sure... more effective? I don't know where they got that from. With their system, if you're not in range of the truck, or terrain interferes with the signal to the truck, or the truck gets damaged, you lose all communication.

How far do you think a hand held battery powered radio can transmit it's signal? Unless you are talking about a HF radio using skywave propagation (to include some maths & carefully positioning an antenna that might be several meters long) it won't be very far, especially in a city or rough terrain. The benefit of having a vehicle mounted radio relay system means that it runs on vehicle power (or a generator) and can carry a lot more antennas. Radio retransmission teams who do exactly this with vehicles fitted for this exact purpose are prevalent in the military, most units will have several of these teams/trucks permanently assigned, and if not, their local signal unit can lend them.

I'm not arguing with the rest of your post, I'm sure there is way more fraud, waste and abuse then we can imagine going on. But the laws of physics still apply and if you want transmit a signal far, you need a power source bigger than what people can carry. Even a vehicle mounted and powered radio wouldn't be able to transmit 10-20 miles unless you were sitting on top of a hill in otherwise perfect conditions.

I have a handheld walkie-talkie radio from REI that can transmit 10-20 miles from the top of a hill in not-perfect conditions (and about 1-2 miles in forested terrain), so I think your range estimates are off by an order of magnitude for high-powered transmissions.

Nah, he's pretty on the mark. I'm lucky to make it into the repeater ~15mi down the road from me(50W on both side) because it's not at the top of a mountain. Unless you're talking HF(which he covers) you're basically still constrained by line-of-sight.

More power just pushes you through small objects(trees, buildings, etc) depending on wavelength.