David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

went out to the door. My family was all there. And she was shouting, ‘They’re locked in their houses. Their children can’t get milk, and they haven’t got anything for a cup of tea, and there’s no bread, and come out, come out, we need to do something!’”
    The Lower Falls is an all-Catholic neighborhood just down the hill from Ballymurphy. Lawlor had gone to school in the Lower Falls. Her uncle lived there, as did countless cousins. She knew as many people in the Lower Falls as she did in Ballymurphy. The British Army had put the entire neighborhood under curfew while they searched for illegal weapons.
    “I didn’t know what ‘curfew’ meant,” Lawlor said. “Hadn’t a clue. I had to say to somebody, ‘What does that mean?’ She said, ‘They’re not allowed out of their houses.’ I said, ‘How can they do that?’ I was totally stunned. Stunned. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘The people are locked in their houses. They can’t get out for bread or milk.’ While the Brits, the British Army, were kicking in doors and wracking and ruinin’ and searchin’, I was, ‘What?’ The biggest thought in everybody’s mind was, there are people locked in their houses, and there’s children. You have to remember, some houses then had twelve, fifteen kids in them. D’you know? That’s the way it was. ‘What do you mean they can’t get out of their houses?’” They were angry.
    Rosemary Lawlor is now in her sixties, a sturdily built woman with ruddy cheeks and short, white-blond hair swept to the side. She was a seamstress by trade, and she was dressed with flair: a bright floral blouse and white cropped pants. She was talking about things that had happened half a lifetime ago. But she remembered every moment.
    “My father said, ‘The Brits, they’ll turn on us. They say they’re in here to protect us. They’ll turn on us—you wait and see.’ And he was one hundred percent right. They turned on us. And the curfew was the start of it.”

2.
    The same year that Northern Ireland descended into chaos, two economists—Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.—wrote a report about how to deal with insurgencies. Leites and Wolf worked for the RAND Corporation, the prestigious think tank started after the Second World War by the Pentagon. Their report was called Rebellion and Authority. In those years, when the world was exploding in violence, everyone read Leites and Wolf. Rebellion and Authority became the blueprint for the war in Vietnam, and for how police departments dealt with civil unrest, and for how governments coped with terrorism. Its conclusion was simple:
    Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves “rationally,” that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly.…Consequently, influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, but rather a better understanding of what costs and benefits the individual or the group is concerned with, and how they are calculated.
    In other words, getting insurgents to behave is fundamentally a math problem. If there are riots in the streets of Belfast, it’s because the costs to rioters of burning houses and smashing windows aren’t high enough. And when Leites and Wolf said that “influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism,” what they meant was that nothing mattered but that calculation. If you were in a position of power, you didn’t have to worry about how lawbreakers felt about what you were doing. You just had to be tough enough to make them think twice.
    The general in charge of the British forces in Northern Ireland was a man straight out of the pages of Rebellion and Authority. His name was Ian Freeland. He had served with distinction in Normandy during the Second World War and later fought insurgencies in Cyprus and Zanzibar. He was trim and forthright, with a straight back and a square jaw and a firm hand: he “conveyed the correct impression of a man who knew what needed to be done and would do it.” When he arrived in Northern Ireland, he made it plain that his patience was limited. He was not afraid to use force. He had his orders from the prime minister: the British Army “should deal toughly, and be seen to deal toughly, with thugs and gunmen.”
    On June 30, 1970, the British Army received a tip. There were explosives and weapons hidden in a