Published Jun 26, 2026, 9:52 AM EDT
'AJ' Pasciuti, known for heroics in Iraq, helped develop a revolutionary course. The branch ended it after only four years.
Amatangelo “AJ” Pasciuti recently passed the one-year mark of a day he would like to forget. On June 1, 2025, the U.S. Marine Corps officially rescinded the Infantry Marine Course, an elaborate training program he, along with many other officers, spent many months formulating, designing and, after some resistance, finally implementing in 2021. Like nearly everything Pasciuti did in a stellar two-decade career in the Marines, he put his heart and soul into developing the course, which featured a student-centered, outcomes-based approach “designed to produce adaptable and cognitively agile warfighters.” Instead, Marine Corps leadership chose to replace the training with a pre-9/11 program due to tight resources and personnel shortages. In his recently released book, “Darkhorse, Harnessing Hidden Potential in War and Life,” Pasciuti writes that the “revised approach de-emphasized critical thinking, cohesion, and individual development in favor of rote memorization, repetition and mass throughput.” While Pasciuti, a former scout sniper, is best known for eliminating “Juba,” perhaps the most lethal and dangerous enemy sniper in the Iraq War, his memoir focuses on leadership and questioning the status quo of military guidance, something he was trying to do with the Infantry Marine Course. Despite being disappointed to see the course end, Pasciuti understands the Marine Corps’ rationale, but worries that reverting to the traditional way of teaching infantry soldiers makes them less equipped for the future of combat.
