Pentagon Clarifies That 'Operation Epic Fury' Actually Just Refers to Secretary of Defense's Extreme Frustration With Microsoft Excel

WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials held an emergency press conference today to clarify that the widely reported 'Operation Epic Fury' is not, in fact, a military operation against Iran, but rather the internal codename for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's ongoing battle with basic office software.

'The Secretary's fury is indeed epic,' explained Pentagon spokesperson Colonel Janet Richardson, visibly exhausted. 'Yesterday alone, he threw his laptop out a third-story window because he couldn't figure out how to merge cells in Excel. We've had to replace 47 keyboards this month.'

The confusion began when Austin was overheard screaming 'I'M LAUNCHING OPERATION EPIC FURY' during a budget meeting, which military stenographers dutifully recorded as an official military directive. Within hours, the Pentagon had accidentally allocated $847 billion toward what they believed was a major overseas conflict.

'We kept waiting for briefings about Iranian targets,' said confused Joint Chiefs member General Mark Milley. 'Instead, we got increasingly unhinged memos about pivot tables and font consistency. At one point, he demanded we mobilize the entire Navy to 'defeat the tyranny of auto-correct.'

The alleged '11,000 targets' were actually Austin's failed attempts to create a simple pie chart, while the '150 ships' referred to his collection of stress-ordered office supplies from Amazon, including 47 identical staplers and 23 ergonomic mouse pads.

Congress has launched an investigation into how a 74-year-old man's technology incompetence nearly triggered World War III, while also questioning why the Pentagon doesn't have a dedicated IT intern.