Games

Yeah, that's a holdover from the original original game from the 90s where a big part of the early game was simply struggling to detect alien activity to stop them in the firat place while they stealthily tried to infiltrate the world governments to cut your limited funding.

You weren't the best and last line of defense, you were just the people crazy enough to believe aliens were a threat, with tenuous connections to get funds from governments to try and fund the fight. There's plenty of in game data about how all your starting equipment is military hand me downs and whatever mothballed prototype designs your team could snatch up on the cheap and retrofit. You can also field squads of up to 14 soldiers from the start, which helps because things are far more of a meat grinder and less of a "just keep enough squads to rotate folks out". Up through mid game, losing two soldiers a mission isn't unusual.

The initial scrappiness and meat grinder aspects were significantly lessened in the more recent XCOM reboot from 2012, which tends to be a more fun experience overall, but does lead to a little bit of dissonance.