In a striking example of the importance of data integrity, as well as personal integrity, Israeli pilots are reportedly either unable to trust the target information they are given or their targets are successfully using civilians to shield themselves from air attacks:
Yonatan Shapiro, a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot dismissed from reserve duty after signing a ‘refusenik’ letter in 2004, said he had spoken with Israeli F-16 pilots in recent days and learnt that some had aborted missions because of concerns about the reliability of intelligence information. According to Shapiro, some pilots justified aborting missions out of ‘common sense’ and in the context of the Israeli Defence Force’s moral code of conduct, which says every effort should be made to avoiding harming civilians.
Shapiro said: ‘Some pilots told me they have shot at the side of targets because they’re afraid people will be there, and they don’t trust any more those who give them the coordinates and targets.’
He added: ‘One pilot told me he was asked to hit a house on a hill, which was supposed to be a place from where Hizbollah was launching Katyusha missiles. But he was afraid civilians were in the house, so he shot next to the house …
‘Pilots are always being told they will be judged on results, but if the results are hundreds of dead civilians while Hizbollah is still able to fire all these rockets, then something is very wrong.’
It seems very probable that a guerilla strategy could be for rockets to be fired from and around houses (e.g. roof-tops) and to then shuttle civilians into the house immediately afterwards, moving the launchers to the next house. This not only keeps the target hard to find, but increases the likelihood of blowback to Israel from any Israeli defensive actions. Maybe that gives them too much credit and they just move the launchers around the civilians. Either way, I do not envy the pilot who has to question the integrity of mission intelligence in the split second before they launch a missle. Compare that with the Hizbullah militants firing rockets willy-nilly into a huge urban area like Haifa.
On the Internet there are many examples of guerilla tactics that the Hizbullah use, such as the “Smurf attack“. This is when someone (A) uses a fake return address of a large or powerful site (B) to overwhelm a target (C) with packets. If/when C tries to fight back, it ends up hitting B instead of A, which either makes C look like the agressor (shaky proof of A) or escalates into a fierce battle between C and B, with only a tiny fraction of effort from A. If A is smart enough to use return addresses D through Z as well as B the problem of intelligence is that much harder to resolve and the cost to C to respond can quickly become prohibitive. A good, albeit dated, background on this issue and proposals for how to address the fundamental issue of attacker identity can be found here.