A big deal with World War 2, I guess, was a mismatch between directable energy and sensing and control systems.
So, one man can kill like 50 guys with a machine gun, but he has to do it in person. One man can fly a fighter plane or dive-bomber, but he has to do it in person, with the range that his eyes can see.
Before the 20th century, especially before muskets, a man has to kill someone else with a sword or bow, which limits just how lopsided things can get for one guy. After the 20th century, portable sensing and control systems have been improving, so either a guy can attack at a distance, or an automated system that's much dumber than a guy, essentially an exploding crow, can kill people. It's a lot harder for a guy to fight a swarm of exploding crows - even harder than, like, fighting an artillery crew.
So this reduces agency compared to earlier eras of combat. The absolute reaction time, strength, and speed of a dude aren't faring well against specialized capital systems.
This has problems for the legitimacy of mass democracy.
Also it has problems for writing. Infantry combat ends up having to take place in a narrower range of spaces, where social, political, or psychological factors prevent using more advanced weapons systems. To some degree, this was already true given the existence of bombers, but in practice there are lots of situations where you don't want to use a bomber in which that you might want to use a drone.
This means, for a cool cyborg detective that gets into gunfights, more contrivance has to be pushed into the political system, to the point that it's less believable that there are competing power centers (since why would they disarm?), unless anti-drone weapons become a lot better.















