It's funny how people are so surprised? This story was already fictionalized in 2004's "Team America - World Police". SEALs, North Korea, it's all there.
Special Forces are secretive, and almost as a law of nature that leads to them being inept.
There is a long list of these special operations in the book "Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs" by Noam Chomsky.
I think "inept" is a bit uncharitable. We have no idea what their success and failure rates are. By their very nature, they take on the trickiest assignments, the ones that are most likely to fail in weird, unexpected ways.
> There is a long list of these special operations in the book...
And I'm sure there's a list orders of magnitude longer that we'll never hear about, and there's no way to judge if the ops in his book are representative of the whole.
Special Forces are secretive, and almost as a law of nature that leads to them being inept.
There is a long list of these special operations in the book "Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs" by Noam Chomsky.