The ethical side of this scenario is more pressing at the moment. Brennan's confirmation hearing has already provided an unprecedented window to engage the nation in a conversation about a drone program that Brennan, the current top counterterrorism official in the White House, more or less designed. It's a program that we don't know a lot about, besides the fact that it's serious and probably more widespread than people think. "The CIA drone program sure feels like a war: unmanned aircraft incinerating thousands of terrorists we're at war with, as well as some civilians," The Atlantic Wire's Elspeth Reeve explains. "And if you look at the reach of the program — now that everyone seems to be looking at the reach of the program again — well, it's nearly worldwide."

So we can assume that our starting point is the increasingly clear reality that drone warfare is happening everywhere — and that, like many things the CIA does, we don't the details. We do know that Obama has a drone playbook that dictates how the military can use its unmanned arsenal, and it's been reported that the CIA's earned a "temporary exemption" from those rules in Pakistan. We also know that we don't know how many people we've killed with our drones in recent years. A report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts the number of casualties over the past five years at about 2,000, many of whom are civilians. So even though the Obama administration has some secret guidelines somewhere, the state of drone warfare seems pretty chaotic at the moment. And do you know what can make an undeclared war even more chaotic? New high-tech, untested weapons and machinery.

The government is developing some crazy stuff, although the current lineup of drones is impressive enough. The Predator aircraft, which as been around since the early 1990s and is pictured at the top of this post, is probably what you're used to seeing in the news and whatnot. They can fly, conduct reconnaissance and shoot missiles, while being controlled by a team of specialists staring at screens, out of harms way. (Check out the two dudes above, flying a Predator and potentially thinking about blowing up a pickup truck.) They cannot, however, win dogfights with piloted planes or accomplish terribly sophisticed missions. They also cost about four million bucks a piece.

The future of drone warfare is mind-bending. Honestly, most things are, when DARPA's involved. The Pentagon's latest greatest creation is a massive drone called the X-47B, built by Northrop Grumman. With a 62-foot wingspan, the X-47B is almost as large as a fighter jet, except it doesn't need a pilot, like, ever. It's being developed for the Navy to become the first drone that can take off and land on an aircraft carrier without any human assistance, although there's always a sailor standing by ready to take over the controls if anything goes wrong. Apparently, when the X-47B isn't robotically scanning the skies, the operator uses a device that that Wired's Spencer Ackerman describes as a "Power Glove for flight-deck operations." Because that's what it's come to: war as video game.