Just a suggestion for future patches or future games of similar gameplay:
Rather than assigning equipment to individual soldiers, I suggest assigning equipment to slots on a dropship, then have soldiers assigned to each slot. When you need to replace a soldier for whatever reason, you simply unassign the soldier from the dropship slot and replace with another soldier, and the equipment carries over. That way, you won't have to manually transfer equipment from one soldier to another every time you replace a soldier.