> they're generally going to deliberately penetrate the "buffer zone",
Yes. My comment concerned your earlier use of principally in "principally intended to preserve normative freedom of movement rights."
I believe they are principally done as surveillance flights, with freedom of movement rights as an important but secondary role.
Otherwise you could use something cheaper than a fully-crewed EP-3.
Besides planes, see "Soviet fishing trawlers" (" After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff authorized a counter AGI program for United States destroyers to come alongside the AGIs to push against them, foul their screws with steel nets, and focus high power electromagnetic transmitters to burn out the amplifying circuitry of their electronic sensors." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_ship ).
