On Monday, Defence Minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin travelled to the Pentagon to sign what both capitals are calling a “Major Defence Cooperation Partnership” with the United States. The agreement itself, covering military modernisation, professional education, and operational exercises, with ambitions toward asymmetric warfare capacity and next-generation maritime and autonomous systems, is, frankly, welcome. Indonesia has real capability gaps. The prospect of better maintenance, repair, and overhaul support, and genuine progress on subsurface and autonomous domains, addresses threats Jakarta has been slow to address. The MDCP, on its own terms, makes sense.

But the MDCP is not the story that has Indonesians worried. The story is what Reuters and Bloomberg reported the day before the signing: that Jakarta and Washington are discussing a proposal to grant US military aircraft blanket overflight access through Indonesian airspace. Indonesia’s Defence Ministry confirmed a preliminary draft of a “Letter of Intent” is being discussed internally, though it stressed the document is not final and carries no binding legal force. Brigadier General Rico Ricardo Sirait, the Ministry’s Information Bureau head, said any such mechanism must go through a “careful and multi-layered review process” consistent with Indonesian law and political authority.

That’s the reassurance. Here is the concern.