THE PENTAGON — A leaked intelligence report has revealed that the much vaunted "near-peer threat" the Defense Department has been preparing to do battle with is, in fact, just three Islamic Afghanistans stacked on each other's shoulders in a trench coat.

The Pentagon, however, has rushed to deny these claims.

"There is absolutely no way the most likely enemy our troops will continue to face in the future will be insurgents and other non-state actors who don't present a clear and well-defined national security threat we can use to justify ever-expanding expenses on useless weapons programs," said whoever happened to be Secretary of Defense at the time. "Obviously, this 'trench coat' guy knows nothing about the budgeting cycle."

The military has struggled to extricate itself from small wars in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria for decades, hoping instead for "good ol' fashioned shootin' wars" with major nation states like China and Russia. But the report shows that these near-peer t…