Headed by Rahmatullah Nabil, who was formally appointed in August 2013, but had actually run the NDS for the previous two years, the organization employs a staff estimated at more than 20,000. Despite some reported cases of the maltreatment of detainees, the NDS has reached a high standard under U.S. SOF sponsorship and has developed a useful capability, including the mounting of night-time raids on Taliban strongholds.

However, in a year when the Taliban killed or wounded between 7,000 and 9,000 Afghan government soldiers (by comparison with more than 2,200 Americans killed and about 20,000 injured over the past 13 years), there remains some skepticism about whether this commitment to Kabul will be sufficient to prevent the country from plunging back into long-term tribal conflict.

The plan nevertheless remains for coalition SOF to operate under the direction of the Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan (SOJTF-A) in Kabul, but the British component would be drastically reduced under a Ministry of Defense plan under consideration in London that would cut the current Special Forces Group strength, presently around 3,500 soldiers and marines, to between 1,750 and 2,000.

Created in 2012, originally under the command of U.S. Gen. Raymond A. “Tony” Thomas, SOJTF-A consisted of 13,000 special operations and support personnel, enhanced by 200 aircraft (including helicopters and Predator and Reaper drones), drawn from 25 different countries, including some non-NATO partners, such as Albania, Romania, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. SOJTF-A deployed some 61 teams to conduct village stability operations with the local Afghan police, with a further 50 similar teams partnering other corresponding Afghan security units. Additionally, a subordinate training cadre, designated SOJTF-B (Bragg), based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, prepared the component SOF units in anticipation of their operational deployment.

In August 2014, Thomas was reassigned from the CIA, where he had been associate director for Military Affairs since 2013, to take command of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Simultaneously, Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the former JSOC commander, was promoted to head U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), succeeding Adm. William McRaven.

The U.K.’s proposed radical cuts, reflecting budget demands in Whitehall, were contained in a list of recommendations that were delivered to Maj. Gen. Mark Carleton-Smith, the U.K.’s director of Special Forces since 2012. A Special Air Service (SAS) veteran who had commanded 22 SAS between 2007 and 2009, Carleton-Smith was required to find substantial financial savings at a time when the Islamic State had taken several British hostages, and one of their captors, the grisly “Jihadi John,” identified as Kuwaiti-born British passport-holder Mohammed Emwazi, was beheading them, thereby outraging world opinion. Controversially, the review also suggested the elimination of one of the SAS’s four sabre squadrons, removing the two reservist SAS units, 21 and 23 SAS, and dispensing altogether with the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, which was only formed in 2005.

The threat to U.K. SOF, at a time when the military situation in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Nigeria is deteriorating, would reduce Britain’s capabilities to their position prior the deployments to Afghanistan. It would also limit the U.K.’s ability to respond to, or support, pleas for assistance from Commonwealth countries. For example, in April 2014, some 200 teenage Christian schoolgirls were abducted from Chibok in the north of Nigeria by Boko Haram, leaving the state authorities in Borno, and the federal government in Abuja, apparently powerless to respond. This incident prompted the Nigerian government to accept an American offer to supply a 16-strong advisory team to train nearly 650 Nigerian soldiers at a base near Maiduguri. The beneficiary was to be a Special Forces Brigade, the 72nd Special Forces Battalion, formerly the 72nd Paratroop Battalion, which had previously received Danish Jaegerkorps and British instructors, but the project collapsed prematurely in recriminations five months later when the U.S. State Department banned the export of certain weapons, apparently uncertain of how they were going to be deployed, citing Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) 1997 amendment that prevents any U.S. administration from supporting regimes suspected of human rights abuses. In September 2014, the U.S. State Department embargoed the sale of Cobra attack helicopters from Israel. Consequently, the ministers in Abuja approached Moscow for assistance, and arranged for 1,200 Nigerians to undergo Russian training. They also opened negotiations to buy 12 Mi-35 attack helicopters from Belarus, although Belarus has no domestic manufacturers of helicopters, and only repairs and modifies existing aircraft.

While the Cobras would not have been useful in the near term anyway, Nigeria not having the trained personnel necessary to fly or maintain them, U.S. Special Operations Command Africa’s Exercise Flintlock bore fruit in early 2015 as training on communications technologies supplied by the United States enabled a task force of troops from Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Benin, and Cameroon to attack Boko Haram in its Sambisa Forest hideouts, freeing more than 500 hostages and throwing the terrorist organization onto the defensive.

In Washington, D.C., controversy centered on the degree to which SOF personnel could be restricted in making public disclosures. This followed publication of a series of books intended to satisfy a public demand for more information about the special operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of a special mission unit popularly referred to as SEAL Team 6, or Devgru, in Abbottabad in May 2011. SEAL Target Geronimo, penned by former SEAL Chuck Pfarrer, was among the first accounts, but Pfarrer’s version was denied by SOCOM spokesman Col. Tim Nye as well as other special operations officials. Next came the Sept. 4, 2012, publication of No Easy Day by a member of the unit, Matt Bissonnette, writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen, which gave a different version of the raid. Another account of the raid, again differing in some details, was written by Mark Bowden in The Finish, published in October 2012. More recently, in November 2014, Robert O’Neill identified himself as having been the SEAL who had actually shot and killed bin Laden.

These contradictory claims led to an abortive Department of Justice investigation into unauthorized disclosures, and was the cause of considerable internal friction about the need for secrecy in SOF operations, especially those of a politically sensitive nature.

Thus 2014 turned out to be a year that could be described as a major milestone for SOF, both East and West.

This article first appeared in The Year in Special Operations 2015-2016 Edition.