The fog of disinformation that surrounds British cybersecurity policy was not dispersed by the government's latest high-profile initiative. The London Cyberspace Conference, brainchild of Foreign Secretary William Hague, saw 700 delegates from more than 60 nations converge last month to discuss a range of issues, although more questions were raised than answered.

The counterinsurgency operations conducted by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan use a number of new weapon systems. Yet there is room for technologies that are long in the tooth—military working dogs (MWD). Although used in combat for centuries, the profile of military working dogs has risen in recent years. The U.S. began to train dogs in 2005 to work off-leash to detect explosives. In May, a Belgian Malinois named Cairo was involved in Operation Neptune Spear, the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden.

Camp Bastion's main entry point (MEP) is, in effect, the front door for ground admission to NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Helmand Province. Here, the imperatives of force protection and base security meet, sometimes conflict with, and ultimately reinforce the wider purpose of the coalition mission. It may seem to be a dichotomy, but the MEP underlines the fact that security rises when trust is built—and vice versa.