In November 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.
Much of the historical record was destroyed when the world was overrun by titans. Historians continue to disagree about the policy actions of President Trump and the resulting effects on the economy, the middle class, and national crime rates. There is unanimous agreement, however, about President Trump's hardline stance against ISIS, his commitment to building a wall along the US-Mexico border, and his actions during the titan apocalypse.
Efforts to create the border wall and defeat ISIS were both stymied by stubbornness. The Mexican government was vehement in its refusal to pay for a border wall, even when threatened with economic sanctions. Victory against ISIS, on the other hand, was stalled by Trump's own stubbornness: he was hesitant to send US troops to the Middle East for fear of sustaining heavy casualties. It seemed that both issues would require out-of-the-box solutions.
Although drone strikes against ISIS proved effective, they were insufficient. Aerial dominance had its limits – a strong ground presence would be necessary to put an end to the battle. To combat ISIS with minimal risk of losing troops, the Trump administration consulted the US military and asked about the feasibility of using robotic soldiers.
The military had been working on combat robots for a long while and had tested two approaches to roboticized warfare. The first approach was to create gundam-like battle armors to be operated by trained handlers. Battle armors would require the physical ground presence of US troops, but the armor would afford them a high degree of protection. However, in 2016, the US military's battle armors were still rigid and clumsy. Furthermore, they were necessarily rather large, and this was deemed undesirable given that much of the battle against ISIS would be waged in civilian-populated zones. The enemy could hide within buildings, and it would be difficult for large mecha fighters to strike back without putting innocent lives at risk. The military's battle armors were not yet ready for the battlefield, and generals agreed that deploying them prematurely in the battle against ISIS would be irresponsible.
The second approach to robot combat was to create fully mechanical soldiers that could be controlled remotely. The remote approach had a couple advantages: they incurred no risk to US troops and could be made smaller than battle armors. However, they, too, had problems. While they could better fight back against enemies in a city setting, they were not substantially less rigid and clumsy than battle armors. Their communication and visual components were difficult to protect, and they could be rendered useless if either were compromised. Also, their latency was frustratingly long.
In the early 21st century, human ground troops were still far more flexible and effective than robots. Additionally, it would be a long while before mechanical soldiers of any kind could be cheaply mass-produced – in comparison to the creation of a robot army, the astronomical US military spending prior to 2016 looked tame. It was difficult to justify defeating the "JV team" of terrorism in this way.