Bushtarion Manual

Essentials:
  In Bushtarion, the art of flakking is most definitely an essential. The definition of flak is to use one unit to protect another type of unit, as if using it as a "buffer" or "shield" against enemy fire. Flakking your land stealing units (wheelbarrowers, geo-phys thieves, stealth-geo thieves or thieves) will enable you to get past INN targeting units, such as hippies and yobs, more effectively.
  To understand how to flak you must first get to grips with different units and their classifications, for example:
* NLD: These units distract other units
* NLT: These units disable other units
* LET: These units kill other units
* BRB: These units bribe other units
* INN: These units have special abilities - such as stealing land, harvesting, and gardening.
  Secondly, you must understand that different units target different types of units, for example:
  Hippies will target INN units first and then NLT units (70% of fire power to INN units and 30% to NLT units). This means that hippies will target your land stealing units. In order to get past these hippies you can use gardeners or any other kind of INN classed unit as a flakking unit. You're also able to flak other unit classes such as LET, NLD and NLT.

Why Flak?:
  As mentioned above, using INN units as flak for your thieves will result in you being a lot more successful in stealing land from hostile players. By flakking you may also save money as you will be able to use cheaper units to flak more expensive units, i.e. using gardeners (£2,200) to flak geo-phys thieves (£60,000) - which would you rather lose? Be sure to also consider this for other units, especially your lethal (LET) units - the concept also holds true here, not just with innocents.

How To Flak:
  Having 1,000 gardeners and 10 geo-phys thieves means that there is a 1 in 100 chance of an INN targeting unit hitting your geo-phys thieves, so the more gardeners you send, the lower the chance of INN targeting units distracting/disabling/killing/bribing your land stealing units. If you were to send just land stealing units alone they would all be hit by the INN targeting units. If, however, you send an INN flakking unit, then the enemies' fire will be spread across the field of your INN units. A visual example of this can be seen below:

In the first image you can see there are only land stealing units. If there were INN targeting units in any defence then they would instantly target those land stealing units all in one go.
In the second image the land stealing units are being flakked by INN class units, meaning that when they encounter enemy fire there will be less of a chance of it hitting your land stealing units and so a stronger chance of survival for them, which in turn means a greater chance of success in stealing land.