JSOC’s success in May was followed by the catastrophic loss of a Chinook three months later on Aug. 6, which resulted in the deaths of all 38 aboard. In the worst incident of its kind in the decade-old war, 30 Americans, together with seven Afghan commandos and a civilian interpreter, were killed when their helicopter was shot down by the Taliban in the mountains of Wardak province, west of Kabul. Among the American casualties were 22 members of the JSOC SEAL SMU that had been on that particular operation. The twin-rotor CH-47 had probably been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) while maneuvering at low altitude soon after takeoff during a night raid on the village of Sayd Abad, the kind of raid that has become almost routine. Good intelligence had indicated the assembly of Taliban guerrillas in an isolated house, and the plan was to engage them during a surprise ambush.

Reportedly, the RPG round had found its target through sheer luck in an encounter that was considered almost unique. Although two coalition aircrew had been injured when their CH-47F had been hit by an RPG a few days earlier on July 25, such attacks are rare, and most aircraft losses are attributed to pilot error in a very challenging landscape, poor weather conditions, or mechanical failure. Some 17 aircraft had crashed during the year, but the scale of this disaster was the worst single loss since 16 U.S. special operations forces personnel perished on June 28, 2005, when another helicopter was shot down in eastern Kunar province while on a mission to rescue four SEALs under attack by the Taliban; three of the SEALs being rescued were also killed and the fourth wounded.

The August 2011 crash is the highest one-day death toll for Naval Special Warfare personnel since World War II and brought the total number of coalition deaths in 2011 to 365. Considering the total SEAL strength is estimated to be approximately 600, the rate of attrition has been daunting.

Despite the losses, JSOC, under McRaven’s command since June 2008, helped turn the tide in Afghanistan and transformed the environment from a terrain wholly advantageous to the Taliban, who could slip over the border into Pakistan’s tribal areas, into a free-fire zone for increasingly sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which picked off targets – on either side of the frontier – selected by intelligence cells located thousands of miles away. In 2008, there were only 36 Predators assigned to the U.S. Army’s Central Command, of which most were in Iraq. By 2011, the balance of UAVs had been reversed, with the MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-170 Sentinel widely deployed across Afghanistan and making regular incursions over “boxes” in Baluchistan and Waziristan, with the tacit consent of the government in Islamabad. This change in strategy has proved so effective that the “jackpot” rate of confirmed hits on high-value targets has risen from 35 percent to 85 percent, thereby reducing the pressure on coalition special operations forces and releasing them for duties elsewhere. For JSOC, this has entailed a bigger presence in the Gulf of Aden, while the British began a wider withdrawal of the SAS to undertake security training for the 2012 Olympic Games.

The concentration on Afghanistan during 2011 was assisted by the withdrawal from Iraq, which was completed on Dec. 15, an event made possible by the development of a large Iraqi special operations capability. Commanded by Maj. Gen. Fadhel al-Barwari, the Iraq special operations force has undergone eight years of training and mentoring with coalition special operations forces, and continues to conduct joint operations on a ratio of six Iraqis to one coalition trooper, usually on search-and-clear anti-terrorist missions against individual suspects identified by special operations intelligence cells. While the main, orthodox commitment ended with much ceremony, the special operations contingent are likely to remain in country for several years to come.

The major change in deployment for JSOC occurred in October, when special operators from Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti were inserted into Uganda, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to pursue the Lord’s Resistance Army’s (LRA) notorious leader, Joseph Kony. Up to then, U.S. special operations forces in the region had been restricted to insertion missions to recover bodies from Predator strikes for verification purposes, as happened on June 23, when a pair of al-Shabaab commanders were caught in a convoy by an armed UAV flown from Yemen, and again on July 6, when three strikes were undertaken in Kismayo, 300 miles from Mogadishu, and in Musa Haji.

The change in strategy, hinted at by Obama’s principal counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, involved “surgical targeted strikes” and the promotion of “indigenous strike forces” with training, equipment, and headquarters support. The campaign against the LRA is based at the Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu and from the National Security Agency of the Somali Transitional Federal Government at the Villa Somalia, also in the capital. Kony, now formally designated an international war criminal, and his militia operate transnationally across the rainforest in several countries in the region, and is now a priority target.

Almost simultaneously, Kenyan troops crossed into the lawless provinces of southern Somalia while French special operators, fresh from an assignment in Ivory Coast in April, attacked the al-Shabaab stronghold of Kudai. Prior to the Kenyan offensive, allied special operations forces had been limited to occasional AC-130 gunship attacks on identified militant training camps and shore bombardments from the USS Chafee (DDG 90), but the deteriorating local conditions, with evidence gathered by Task Force Orange personnel based in Nairobi of an al Qaeda evacuation from Yemen to war-torn Somalia, prompted the escalation.