This reads cool and all, but I also can't help help but feel like it might not have been as much of a 'gotcha' as the text makes it out to be. Who knows what kind of information the Russians got from this episode. The closer the NATO response is to what would actually happen in a combat scenario, the more valuable such a provocation is to them, I suspect.

The author does have a point about making incursions so normal we no longer react to them.

And that’s before you even get to the asymmetric costs.