The Influence Operation That Never Sent a Single Message | Stephen Hunnewell

Navigating Noise is a weekly interview show about how the world's most critical decisions get made, and what happens when the data behind them breaks down. Hosts Jonathan Teubner and Erol Yayboke talk to the people working at the edge of intelligence, influence, and strategic competition.

Stephen Hunnewell is a Senior Principal within MITRE's Strategic Non-Kinetic Effects Mission Center, where he focuses on strategic influence and economic statecraft. Before MITRE, he served two tours in Afghanistan, first as an infantry officer, then as a civil affairs officer in the Pech River Valley, one of the deadliest stretches of the war.

In this episode, Stephen reconstructs an operation the Army called Crop Diversification, one that got left out of the definitive book on the valley: a program that paid Afghan farmers to stop growing the dense, unmanaged cornfields the Taliban used for cover and ambush positions. He points out partway through that he never once said the word "psyop." Jonathan presses him on what "influence" actually means once you strip away messaging, and the two get into why the discipline keeps sliding back into silos inside the U.S. system that's supposed to run it.

In this episode:

• Operation Crop Diversification: paying Afghan farmers to stop growing the cornfields the Taliban ambushed from

• How he got through the entire story without once saying the word psyop

• Money as a weapon system, and what economic statecraft looked like before anyone called it that

• Night letters, and why Taliban retaliation against villagers became the measure of effectiveness

• Why influence became a dirty word inside the system that runs on it

• What the OSS had that the US has never rebuilt, and why nobody wants to be the propaganda czar

• How defense and influence work went from unfundable to fashionable

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