Enough with the ace combat fanfics. In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship would not be allowed to hang around with potentially a shitload of drones in its containers.

In a serious drone war, the cargo ship wouldn't know it was carrying containers full of drones, as we saw in Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb[0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb

Wouldn't that be the war crime of perfidy, similar to when the US used a secret plane painted as a civilian aircraft to sink one of the Venezuelan boats 9/2025?

Like that tens of times unaffiliated cargo ships dragged anchor for tens of kilometers to dredge fiberoptic cables in the Baltic.

Warships are explicitly allowed to use false flags at sea, provided they lower them and raise their true flag before launching an attack. So all that would change to be legal would be to raise the flag and then unleash the drone swarms.

I'm not quite sure if just putting up a military flag on a civilian transport ship makes it count as a warship or not though.