Helicopter Oxymoron

Sometimes I wonder about military helicopters. They seem to have a real hard time keeping them in the air, even when nobody is shooting at them. Maybe it's just bad luck. Maybe there are only a few incidents, but they just happen at the wrong time and so make the front pages, like the choppers Carter sent to Tehran that crashed, or the chopper that crashed in Abbottabad recently. ("The Pave Hawk had mechanical failure and made a hard landing after half the platoon "fast roped" into the compound.")

But then I come across this incident and I wonder WTF is going on? Are these things so flaky they can't fly a couple of hundred miles without a serious incident?

From the story in Navy Times: "The helicopters flew at times just 50 to 100 feet above the lake, which sits at 6,225-foot elevation, and hovered at about 70 feet when the first helicopter lost power from its tail rotor, spun around and inadvertently settled into the water shortly before the second aircraft did the same, the investigation found." (emphasis mine).

Is this because turbines are inherently less reliable? Or maybe it's just modern military helicopters are too complex? Or are they scrimping on maintenance for some reason? Or have I just picked up on the only three incidents in the last 30 years?

Update: I realize the Lake Tahoe thing was probably a stunt. I think both copters losing power to (from?!?!) the tail rotor at the same time is too much of a coincidence. Maybe the guys in back wanted to go for a swim, although Lake Tahoe is too cold for me. I don't really have any complaint about this, there was only half a million dollars worth of damage compared to the $50 million for the loss of the entire chopper in Abbottabad. I mean, how do you find out what you can do with a chopper if you don't try it once in a while?

Update #2: I got my links confused. Here is the link to the story in Tactical World, complete with video.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.