This legal dilemma is not confined to the Middle East. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia, as the world’s largest archipelagic state, sits astride sea lanes that connect the Pacific and Indian Oceans and link northern approaches to Australia. These routes are central not only to global trade but also to military planning.

The Indo-Pacific has become a testing ground for unmanned systems, from China’s rapid expansion of drone capabilities and Australia’s integration of drones into AUKUS-related defense planning to the widespread use of loitering munitions in Ukraine. In this environment, the stakes for how archipelagic sea lanes are regulated have never been higher.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), archipelagic states like Indonesia must allow "archipelagic sea lanes passage" for ships and aircraft of all states. This right is fundamental to global navigation and trade.

But what happens when the object moving through those lanes is not a traditional ship or aircraft, but a kamikaze drone or an unmanned vessel designed for a one-way mission?

UNCLOS was negotiated in the 1970s and 1980s, long before loitering munitions, suicide drones or autonomous sea craft became realities of modern warfare. The drafters of the convention could not have anticipated that belligerents might one day send unmanned weapons across thousands of miles, transiting through neutral archipelagic waters en route to their targets.

Under current law, only ships and aircraft are entitled to passage. Missiles and munitions, by contrast, have no such right. For example, a Tomahawk cruise missile fired from a submarine cannot legally claim the right to fly through Indonesia’s airspace above archipelagic sea lanes on its way to another state.