What does WWII have to do with a video game??? You’re trying to apply real world scenarios to a video game, man. I’m not going to argue with your flawed logic anymore.
I’m simply stating it’s a bad mechanic and makes the game less enjoyable, and the games does not warn you. Numerous others have chimined in and echoed the sentiment, or something similar with proposed changes.
I think you are missing the point entirely and dragging discussion into some irrelevant direction.
You don’t understand example about civilians during the war? But nevermind.
About games. Does recruits in 1994 X-COM came with weapons and experience so you took them to the battlefield before preparing them to fight? No? Then why you expect something like that from Phoenix Point?
Because this isn’t 1994 and the way we make video games has changed a lot over the past 25 years 
So FiraXCOM in 2012 gave you recruits with weapons and armors?
Well, normal difficulty does give you armor and weapons. So why are you asking us about decision of developers?
It’s pretty clear that many posted here that they don’t give a crap which way it’s done, just stick to one thing.
Even better, add interface where one can choose if he wants to hire a soldier with his gear or not, then everyone is happy.
Who gives a damn what Firaxis did? It’s irrelevant to subject in place.
Sometimes you’ll find soldiers out in the wilds and a small multi choice thing pops up, in those situations you get the full gear.
And that is why I told you that lower difficulties in PP are bad in this field. 
I get the impression that more stated that they prefer how it is on Legendary setting. 
Why not. I just answer to the main question of this topic. That it should be like that that they come empty handed.
Ramzi, bringing games into question. I give example of few games from this genre.
Then you are missing the point or didn’t follow discussion. Not much use in replying to first message when there are 60 other posts already made.
I’m questioning doubts of creator of this thread. 
And as “Bored Engineer” you should understand that.
EDIT: So my answer is. They should join you like that. 
It depends. If it’s a game to be replayed, I would expect higher difficulties to be designed for subsequent playthroughs, to make things interesting when player knows already how things work and what to expect.
At least I learned a new word.
I have no problem with diffficulty level that change game rules. But the game should indicate the modifications. I prefer different rules as insane aim and damage that makes anything but hiding a death sentence.
The devs was good about damage explanation in the ingame info. The difficulty settings and the factions tech specialities are less clear.
+1 to that.
I have no problem with the recruit kit changing as Difficulty gets higher - in fact I was very pleased when I discovered that my first recruits in this new iteration had no weapons, it made much more sense to me than them coming fully equipped. After all, why would a Faction allow someone to walk off with an incredibly expensive Sniper Rifle if they weren’t working for them any more?
But while I disagree with the OP and others on many (if not most) of the points they have made on this thread, I do sympathise that there should be some prior warning as to the state of the recruit you are going to get.
Getting recruits fully armed & armoured on Easy/Standard Difficulty, unarmed on Heroic and unarmoured on Legendary makes perfect sense to me - it makes the game more challenging on the higher levels. My only gripe is to agree with the OP that all soldiers should have some basic proficiency with at least 1 easily obtainable weapon (I’d suggest Pistol) - otherwise the 600+ resources you just spent on that Infiltrator is a hell of a lot to pay for a glorified Medic.
Yes, the most certainly did. Every soldier came with a primary weapon, basic armor and a grenade… because they were soldiers… 
I will just quote you admit restart a lot in other games. Yes can’t be beat without a serious pre knowledge.
Otherwise either it’s not knowing many thing will generate many errors and for highest difficulties it will lead to a fail, either it’s not a very difficult game.
As soon as there are many choices to do, those choices can’t be always good not knowing future enemies, future enemies scaling, future missions, future missions scaling, many many more.
I know many players pretend do perfect builds without pre knowledge, but they don’t say how much they read on the game, nor how much they tested and tried the game.
What does this have to do with your assertion that Hero and Legend mode cannot be played as someone’s first playthrough? My reference to restarts in X-COM were due to player error, not difficulty setting, which is what this thread was about. Allow me to reiterate because you’re seriously going off topic; PP having harder mechanics is fine on the higher difficulties, but the player needs to be better informed as to what those changes look like.
I don’t even know what you mean by “pre-knowledge.”
I didn’t wrote that or it was an error, if we agree let not lost more time on that.
A lot of people are sick and tired of all the hand holding that modern video games do. Most games these days treat you like a child, pointing out every nuance of how the game is played, making there nothing left for you to discover on your own. Some of us find THAT to be the flawed game design, and find a game like this, that throws you into the deep end without water wings, very refreshing. Yes, it’s not 1994 anymore. But that doesn’t mean a game that is clearly meant for adults needs to spell everything out for new players like they’re gonna be 12 year olds. Yes, there are many people upset by how this game doesn’t tell you everything, and maybe it does need a couple more tooltips, but there’s also a lot of people like me that are enjoying a game that lets us learn by playing instead of keeping the training wheels on until every aspect of the game is explored.