I'm on my third normal ironman game (lost the first two). Lol, I feel like a horrible player now.
Maybe if you don't lose a guy early on, you end up not losing anyone later on? As the skill sets get really powerful after the 4th level or so. I'd put my second defeat on losing too many priority team members over a long period of time.
There is a lot of luck involved, the game has a horrible cascade effect.
If you do well (either through luck or skill) you have better troops, more sats up, more money/engineers from missions, which in turn mean you can build more useful things, tech and sats.
If you do poorly (again luck or skill, or just silly mistakes when you weren't thinking) you not only loose troops but also the rewards and increase panic so good chance of loosing areas and not being able to afford sats. On top of that areas lost to panic don't seem to get picked for abduction missions so there is more concentration of panic in the continents you still have.
Really they should have made countries pay more the higher the panic was, until you lost a country, just so players who are unlucky or plain aren't as good get a little more help.
Best start I had let me have two sats up the end of first month, five the second, ten by the third and complete coverage by the forth. At which point you have so much resource it's hard to lose.