Our History

The Corps was created in 1911, but the habit it formalized was already fifty years old. In his report for 1861 the Adjutant General wrote: "In many former annual reports I have frequently recommended the organization of a State Military School, and again recur to the subject." Nobody built the school. What grew instead was a scattering of cadet companies that attached themselves to the National Guard wherever a community wanted one.

The most durable of them was the Battalion of University Cadets at the University of California. It was part of the National Guard: it reported to the Adjutant General, who furnished its arms and commissioned its officers. In 1873 George C. Edwards was its major, remembered ever after as "Colonel Edwards," and James H. Budd was a second lieutenant in Company B. Budd went on to become a major of the 6th Infantry in 1885 and a brigadier general commanding the 3rd Brigade in 1887. By 1888 a number of California National Guard officers, many in technical staff billets, had begun their service in the University Cadets. By 1880 the cadet curriculum at Berkeley included the study of the "Codes and Regulations Governing the National Guard of California," and the names of University Cadet officers were carried on the Guard's own roster.

Other cadet companies came and went, attached to regiments as convenient. A cadet company was mustered in at Santa Rosa in June 1885 and attached to the 5th Infantry as Company E. In 1886 a cadet company at Modesto was attached to the 6th Infantry Battalion. The cadet company of San Francisco High School was attached to the First Infantry Regiment in 1892, and on 20 May 1892 another was authorized for the Second Artillery. These were not the same thing as the earlier Sacramento Cadets of 1856 or the Placer Cadets of 1865; those were ordinary line companies of the Guard that simply happened to be called cadets.

The practice did not survive the war with Spain anywhere except at the University of California. But it had proved useful: in 1896 the University Cadets alone furnished two field officers to brigade staffs and an officer to the Naval Battalion, and two staff officers of field rank and a lieutenant commander in the Naval Militia came out of the cadet companies. The custom at Berkeley of inviting the Adjutant General to present commissions to ROTC cadet officers is a direct survival of this arrangement.

The idea belonged to Brigadier General Edwin A. Forbes. In 1910, after what he called "a fairly careful but hasty study of the military educational systems of the countries of Europe and of Japan," Forbes drafted a bill during the last days of the legislative session. It passed, and was approved on 5 April 1911. The Legislature appropriated $5,000, which was "only enough money," the Adjutant General admitted, "to experiment with the measure."

The experiment was deliberate about one thing: it was not the Army's program, and it was not the schools' program either. It was both. The instruction and the discipline stayed in the hands of boards of education and school principals; the arms, the ammunition, the instructors and the inspections came from the state's military department. As the Adjutant General put it in 1920, this was "the first instance in the United States, so far as is known, where an effort was made to organize state-wide military training in the schools under the supervision of the head of the State's military department."

Twenty-one organizations formed under the act in the first year. Four of them dropped out almost immediately, because of, in the Adjutant General's blunt phrasing, "the socialistic tendencies of new teachers coming into control of the school, or on account of the lack of a competent instructor for the cadets." The Corps would later date its own beginning to 17 schools and 1,500 cadets.

Even at the start, the stated purpose was not really soldiering. The 1920 report is explicit: the aim was "not to lay particular stress upon the purely military training, but rather to inculcate in the members of the High School Cadets those qualifications of self-reliance, subordination to recognized Authority, and teamwork." That sentence has survived every reorganization since.

Behind those totals: one colonel, 11 captains, 43 first lieutenants and 137 second lieutenants took commissions in the Army; 17 former cadets became ensigns in the Navy; five went to West Point and four to Annapolis. Another 198 became noncommissioned officers, 109 sergeants and 89 corporals. Counting officers and NCOs together, 416 of the 1,906 who served, or 22 percent, went in as leaders.

The Senate was struck by something else as well. "Practically every boy who was old enough to enlist," the resolution noted, "that is 18 years of age or over, entered the service," and nearly all who applied were found physically qualified, which the senators took as proof of the training's value. They resolved that the Senate "express its approval and appreciation of the splendid results obtained from military training in the high schools of California," and asked that every school be told so by circular letter.

The Corps' own wartime training had been modest enough: five-day camps when the appropriation allowed, commanded by selected Army or Guard officers, with the cadets fed a straight Army ration that the Adjutant General reported "was always found sufficient and of good quality." In 1920 rifle camps were held at the Leona Heights range in Oakland and at Eagle Rock in Glendale. Company No. 27 of Dinuba Union High School took the team championship with a five-man average of 81 percent; S. Gonzales of Company 20, San Jose High School, won the individual title with 131 out of a possible 150.

The Corps' first near-death experience came not from a budget cut but from success. In 1919 the federal government took over the cadet programs in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Pasadena and reorganized them into Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps units. Those were the five largest school systems in the state. The Corps lost them all at once.

The damage shows starkly in the Adjutant General's accounting: a corps that had fielded roughly 250 companies was reduced to 24 companies and three bands. What remained was, in the department's own description, "supplementary to the Junior ROTC," maintained in the handful of high schools that could not get a federally funded ROTC unit. And it was hobbled by something mundane. "It is thought that it will not be a success," the 1926 report warned, "as long as the cadets are required to furnish their own uniforms." The state appropriation could not cover them, and repeated approaches to the federal government for uniforms failed.

So the Corps spent the 1920s as a six-school program: Sacramento, Fresno, Porterville, Dinuba, Oroville and Galt, trading trophies among themselves. Porterville was judged the most proficient corps two years running, in 1926-27 and 1927-28. Shasta Union withdrew; Galt was accepted, then mustered out in July 1931 for falling below standard; Anaheim organized in September 1930. The annual rifle and small-bore competitions ran at the state range at Leona Heights every May like clockwork.

And then, quietly, in a fairground in Sacramento, the Corps invented the thing it would still be doing a century later.

The Corps came out of the Depression the way it went in: small, stubborn and shooting well. On 11 February 1941, 140 students of Lassen Union High School and Junior College in Susanville were formally inducted as Company E, First Separate Battalion. The inspecting lieutenant promised 50 Army rifles immediately, and 20 of the company's 24 officers signed up for the spring officers' training camp in Sacramento.

The war changed the program's legal footing. Legislation in 1945 required high schools to include the cadet program in their schedule of instruction wherever the statutory conditions existed, a mandate the 1911 act had never contained. By 1946 the Corps numbered some 5,000 cadets in 70 public and private high schools, administered by the Adjutant General through a staff of six officers working full-time on cadet affairs. Somewhere in this stretch the name changed too: the Corps' own heraldry dates the shift from "California High School Cadets" to "California Cadet Corps" to 1945, though a 2011 account in the Guard's magazine puts it at 1935. The records disagree, and the Corps has never settled it.

What is not in doubt is what happened at Fort Ord in July 1946. General Joseph Stilwell, commanding Sixth Army, made a complete section of the post available to the Corps. Some 650 cadets arrived by chartered bus and special train on 1 July for twelve days, moving into barracks that an advance detail of 40 Anaheim cadets had already set in order. The Adjutant General called it "a high point in 35 years development."

In 1947 the summer camp moved permanently to Camp San Luis Obispo, where it still meets. Then the Corps simply grew, faster than anyone had planned for and faster, in the end, than the state would pay for.

In September 1946 it had 52 schools and 4,100 cadets. By May 1948: 80 schools and 5,000. By May 1953: 105 schools and a peak of 7,013. By May 1954: 120 schools and 7,775. By June 1957: 168 schools and a peak of 10,194. And in 1957-58 the Corps reached the largest it has ever been, with 182 schools and a peak enrollment of 11,201 cadets. Summer camp drew 1,535 cadets in 1957 and 1,950 in 1958.

This was also the era of the private military academies, which enrolled as regular cadet battalions alongside the public high schools: Mount Lowe in Altadena (137th), Elsinore Naval and Military School (167th), Southern California Military Academy in Long Beach (121st), Harding in Glendora (141st), Page in Los Angeles (129th), Cheviot Hills in Culver City (127th), built on the old Pacific Military Academy grounds where the Army's First Motion Picture Unit had been billeted and where a young officer named Ronald Reagan was filmed queuing for lunch, Ridgewood in Woodland Hills (119th), Southwestern in Pasadena (139th) and Urban in Los Angeles (117th). One state institution belonged too: the Preston School of Industry, a California Youth Authority facility, fielded the 40th Battalion.

What held it all together was competition. The state rifle matches at the Sacramento Armory at 12th and W Streets were the Corps' annual centre of gravity, and the trophy list reads like a memorial wall, because much of it is one.

Each year the highest-scoring cadets from the state finals competed at summer camp for places on a team that went to the National Smallbore Rifle Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio, to shoot against all comers. In the late 1950s the team was essentially Oxnard Union High School: in one year John Lenox brought home twelve medals, Jerry Hendrick nine, Bill Kindred seven.

The 1969 trip says more about the Corps than the medals do. Norwalk High School had won the state championship and earned the right to represent California. The state could find only $700 to send them. The cadets and the Norwalk community raised the other $1,800 themselves, and Lieutenant Governor Ed Reinecke presented the team with a California Bear Flag before they left.

The program was rebuilt in 1972 so that every cadet and every team could qualify for the state championships by score rather than by invitation. The old system, the department admitted, "favored schools with rifle ranges." Participation at Camp Perry climbed from 13 cadets in 1971 to 40 in 1974, when the team came home with ten individual awards and sixteen team awards, three of them firsts.

The Corps fell almost as fast as it had risen. Between 1958 and 1960 it lost 45 schools, dropping from 182 to 137. The eight regions were consolidated into four. Budget limitations ended the supervisors' jobs entirely, so the Adjutant General asked the Commandants Association to supply volunteer liaison officers instead, and handed the annual inspections to the Army Guard, the Air Guard and the National Guard Reserve, many of whose inspecting officers, the report notes, had never heard of the program before they were sent to inspect it.

Then it got worse. The 1960-61 budget provided no salaries and no wages at all: $39,111 for supplies and uniforms, and nothing for a single human being to run the program. The State Military Department absorbed the work.

In February 1961, Senator Hugh W. Burns personally appeared before both houses of the Legislature and pushed the Cadet Corps budget through, funding a coordinator and a secretary, $63,264 in all. It was the first of several rescues by a single determined adult. That same year the Corps marked its 50th anniversary of continuous operation.

And then, in fiscal year 1965-66, the state eliminated the Corps' funding completely. It was reinstated by the Legislature the following year at $83,602, a figure based on the 1964-65 budget and, as the department noted drily, "not sufficient to employ a full-time staff." Because many believed the reinstatement was only temporary, a spending freeze was imposed on 13 January 1967 and $40,312 was handed back to the General Fund. The Corps had been saved and then told not to spend the money.

With funding restored but thin, the Corps deliberately shrank to fit. Support was withdrawn from most of the 800 cadets in private schools and enrollment was limited to public schools, averaging 4,100 cadets in 85 schools in 1966-67 and 4,295 in 77 schools by 1969-70. Colonel Robert O. English became Executive Officer on 1 December 1966; Major George J. Robinson succeeded him in 1970.

The war made the program unpopular on campus, and the private academies that had been its showpieces began to close. Harding Academy in Glendora shut in 1972 after 38 years; its superintendent, Colonel William G. Harding, Jr., traced "a downhill slide since 1962" and admitted that "closing is the thing sensible people would have done years ago." Mount Lowe in Altadena followed in 1973, Elsinore in 1977, Ridgewood in 1981, Southern California Military Academy in 1987. The rest of the country's military academies were dying at the same time and for the same reasons.

But the Corps itself was reorganizing rather than retreating. On 1 October 1971 it formed five cadet brigades, with a sixth added on 1 September 1972, the first structure capable of running training beyond what a single school could manage. The head of the Corps took the title Commandant. For the 60th anniversary on 5 April 1971 a new shoulder patch was adopted, carrying the traditional design inside a new arc reading CALIFORNIA CADET CORPS.

On 25 April 1972, Governor Ronald Reagan inspected a 50-cadet honour guard at El Camino High School in Sacramento and spoke for thirty minutes to 250 cadets. He called them "true peacemakers."

And on 30 June 1973 Reagan signed a bill introduced by Assemblyman Leroy F. Greene permitting both male and female membership in the California Cadet Corps. A female uniform, khaki shirt and Union Blue skirt, was adopted on 24 October 1973 and issued as a package of material, pattern, zipper and thread so schools could sew it at cost. Los Angeles joined the program with junior high units in 1976, which is why several later accounts date coeducation to that year instead.

The change took hold faster than anyone expected. By March 1974, Company A of the 159th Battalion at Brawley Union High School had 61 girls and 34 boys, the largest unit in the state. The principal called them Hogan's Heroines, after their adviser. "We got orders from the state to let girls join," he said, "and we were expecting about 10 girls to show up at that first meeting."

In 1973 the first state summer camp since 1958 was held at Camp Roberts with 250 cadets. The 1974 camp drew nearly 400 cadets and 32 commandants for ten days, adding rappelling, survival training and orienteering to the program.

By the end of the 1981-82 school year the Corps was organized into seven brigades with 70 junior and senior high schools and 3,800 cadets, 27 percent of them female. It was winning national recognition: in both 1979 and 1981 the California Cadet Corps was the national winner of the Adjutants General Association's Minuteman Mike Award for National Guard-sponsored school programs.

In June 1982 it was slashed from the state budget. The department's contingency plan was to decentralize administration onto the headquarters of the California National Guard "in order to rescue the program from extinction." For three years the units struggled on their own, making do, as the Los Angeles Times reported later, "with tattered, hand-me-down uniforms, surviving on momentum and volunteers." In 1985 the Corps was revitalized.

What emerged was a different program with a different argument for itself. By the mid-1980s the State Department of Education had recognized the Cadet Corps as a school-based dropout prevention program, and that, rather than officer production, became the case for its existence. The 1982-86 report counted 55 units and 3,300 members, 24 percent female; the 1986-90 report counted 57 schools and 3,000 members, 25 percent female, organized in six brigades.

By 1990 the Corps had 3,500 students in 54 schools. Los Angeles was large enough to need two brigades of its own: the 7th in the San Fernando Valley with about 700 cadets in nine schools, and the 8th with 1,050 in the east of the city. At Pacoima Junior High, Colonel Larry Morden, commandant since Los Angeles joined in 1976 and by then the last of the district's original cadet teachers, had 74 cadets, 22 of them girls, and a waiting list he could not seat for lack of classroom space. "This is the only class that can run itself," he said.

It was in the inner-city schools that the Corps found its second life. When the program started at Monroe Junior High in Inglewood in 1992, nearly a third of the school's 800 students joined within four months. The state director called it "kind of like a positive gang instead of a negative gang." Anthony Cooks, who ran the district's 9th Brigade at 28, estimated that 60 percent of his cadets came from fatherless homes, required a C average to stay in, and took them into downtown Los Angeles at weekends to work the missions that fed the homeless.

And then, in the fiscal year 1992-93 budget, the state eliminated the funding again.

The Corps' next chapter was written by a mayor. Around 2001 Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, pushed through the Oakland Military Institute over the objections of the city's own school board and at a cost of roughly $3 million. His reasoning was simple: military academies had served wealthy families for generations, so why not offer the same thing to poor ones? "Young people like structure," he said at the time. "You gotta have structure where everyone knows the story. Form creates clarity." The academy was built on the Cadet Corps curriculum, and every OMI cadet is a member of the Corps.

It worked. OMI's first class graduated in 2007: 53 students, 80 percent accepted to four-year colleges, all of them finishing with the coursework required for a state university. By 2010 about a quarter of its graduates were going to University of California campuses, roughly twenty times the rate of other Oakland public schools, and the cadets logged more than 7,000 hours of community service in a year, earning the school the western regional Jefferson Award for Public Service.

The model spread. In North Hollywood, the Cadet Corps unit at Madison Middle School grew from 40 cadets and one instructor to 210 cadets, about a tenth of the student body, and three instructors. The campus recorded the district's most-improved middle school test scores, with cadets showing the largest gains of any group, and suspensions fell about 30 percent. The whole program cost $30,000 a year. In 2011 the Riverside County Office of Education opened a military charter school in Moreno Valley as the 322nd Battalion, and the California Military Institute in Perris fielded the 319th and 320th. In 2013 North Valley Military Institute in Granada Hills converted from a conventional charter, enrolling 260 students in its first year and 380 in its second: 80 percent Latino, 82 percent low-income, about a quarter in special education. "We're using the military structure to get kids to go to college," its principal said.

On 9 April 2011, more than 1,000 cadets passed in review at the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base to mark the Corps' 100th anniversary. Governor Jerry Brown, the same man who had built the Oakland Military Institute a decade earlier, took the review. "People are having a hard time deciding what our common purpose is," he told them. "I see in the California Cadet Corps the training of our future leaders who rise above their own selfish interests and think about the state and the country first. That's what leadership is about." At the same ceremony he swore in Colonel David Baldwin as head of the California National Guard.

By the Corps' own centennial reckoning, about a million young men and women had been members over the hundred years. It had also become, as one officer put it, "quite possibly the best-kept secret in California," and at that moment it was very nearly a secret worth keeping alive on purpose. In mid-2011 the Corps was down to 39 detachments. By the start of 2012 it had rebuilt to 61.

The recovery was deliberate. The Military Department began describing the Cadet Corps as its fourth major component, alongside the Army National Guard, the Air National Guard and the State Military Reserve, a framing meant to end decades of it being treated as an afterthought. Major General Baldwin set out to triple the program's size, hire full-time staff and pair every detachment with a Guard unit. The honesty in that push is worth recording: "We do so many things well," the task force chief of staff admitted, "but the program is still using 20th century approaches with 21st century kids." At the time the Corps served about 5,500 cadets on less than $115 of state funding each, and only about 3 percent of them went on to serve in the armed forces.

The Corps also, at long last, built an adult noncommissioned officer corps. Until around 2012 the only adult NCO in the organization was the command sergeant major; below that, the Corps was an all-officer staff, which is not how any military organization actually runs. Adult NCO ranks were established and real NCOs began to be appointed for the first time.

The traditions came back one at a time. In June 2013 the weeklong summer camp returned to Camp San Luis Obispo after a 23-year absence, and more than 170 cadets graduated on 30 June. In September 2014 the Corps began training school units as Community Emergency Response Teams, twelve schools in the first cohort, turning the century-old first-aid instruction into something a campus could actually deploy. The officer who ran that program, then Lieutenant Colonel Michael Smith, commands the California Cadet Corps today.

And in June 2014 the cadets went to Sacramento and lobbied for themselves. The question before the Commission on Teacher Credentialing was whether military instructors could earn a special teaching authorization in physical education, which mattered because without PE credit cadets could rarely fit the class into a ninth-grade schedule. Cadet Major Luke Buzzelli of Porterville High School and Cadet Major Chloe Smith of Aquinas High School, the two highest-ranking cadets in the state, testified in person. "This decision should not be seen as good versus bad," Smith told the commissioners, "but good versus great." The commission voted 10 to 2 in the cadets' favour. Chloe Smith went on to command the 10th Brigade and was appointed to West Point with the class of 2019.

The rebuild worked, and for a few years the Corps had something it had almost never had: money. By 2017, with the support of Governor Jerry Brown, the program was operating on the largest budget in a generation.

It did not last. In 2019 the budget was cut back to almost nothing, and the Corps came close, once again, to running with no meaningful state support at all. Anyone reading this page from the top will recognize the pattern: 1965, 1982, 1992, and now 2019. The Corps has never been more than a budget cycle away from having to prove itself again.

Then came March 2020. Summer camp had run for seven consecutive years since its 2013 revival. In 2020 it stopped.

The lasting damage was not the cancelled camp. It was what the cancelled camp interrupted. A cadet program is transmitted person to person: the cadets who know how a training unit runs teach the cadets coming up behind them, and then they graduate. That chain has no other copy. When the pandemic broke a year out of it, the Corps lost subject-matter knowledge that had lived only in the heads of teenagers who were now gone, and a number of programs simply reset to zero and had to be rebuilt from the regulation up.

It is the same lesson the Corps learned in 1982 and 1992 in a different form. What survives a bad year is whatever an adult wrote down or a cadet remembered. In 2021 camp came back.

Since 2021 the Corps has met or beaten a 10 percent annual growth goal every single year.

The encampment is the clearest measure of it. The camp that came back in 2021 had about 300 cadets. The 2026 encampment had roughly 800, making it one of the largest and most successful in some thirty years. The training units have multiplied well past the basic-training-and-marksmanship program of the 1950s: alongside leadership, Officer Candidate School, the NCO Academy and marksmanship now sit cyber, drone, SCUBA, STARBASE, culinary, engineering, firefighting, law enforcement, public safety, lifeguard, mountaineering, survival, the Recondo challenge course, the Grizzly Adventure unit and CERT.

Two things made that scale workable. The encampment runs on its own operations platform, which handles applications, rosters and camp operations end to end rather than on the spreadsheets and paper that a camp of 300 could survive. And the camp now runs a real medical clinic — a staffed doctor's office run by California State Guard personnel — which is a large part of why an 800-cadet encampment could be held safely at all. In 1946 the Corps' medical plan at Fort Ord was one camp medical officer; in 2026 it is a clinic.

In 2023 the Corps replaced its public website. By 2026 the program serves more than 7,500 cadets at over 110 schools — larger than at any point since the 1960s, and closing on the peaks of the 1950s.

For most of its history the Corps ran on paper, and then for about twenty years it ran on a PHP application called Commandant Tools. In 2026 that was replaced by Cadet HQ, a full unit-administration portal: rosters and cadet records, strength and activity reporting, promotion testing, orders, property and inventory, certifications and travel, all in one place instead of scattered across a legacy tool, spreadsheets and email. For a commandant, it is the difference between running a battalion out of a filing cabinet and running it out of a system.

Cadet HQ is the visible piece of a deliberate strategy. It came out of Commander COL Michael Smith's initiative to modernize the Cadet Corps and bring its administration up to a contemporary standard, and it was driven by the Future Initiatives Committee, a special staff group whose remit is strategic work aimed at where the Corps needs to be rather than where it is. The internal name for that horizon is Cadet Corps 2050.

That is a longer planning horizon than the program has usually been permitted. An organization defunded in 1965, 1982 and 1992, and cut to nearly nothing again in 2019, has spent most of its life planning one budget at a time. Naming a target twenty-four years out is, in its way, the most optimistic thing the Corps has done in a century.

The California Cadet Corps is still what the 1911 act made it: a joint enterprise of the state's military department, the Department of Education and local school districts, taught inside the regular school day by credentialed teachers, with the cadets running as much of it as they can be trusted with. Its curriculum rests on four pillars — Leadership, Citizenship, Wellness and Military Knowledge — and its cadets now train on drones and cyber ranges as readily as their predecessors trained on Krag-Jörgensens.

The things that have not changed are easier to list. Cadets still earn their way into leadership. Rank still depends on grades. Units are still inspected once a year. The camp is still at Camp San Luis Obispo, where it has been since 1947. And the mission the Adjutant General wrote down in 1920 — self-reliance, subordination to recognized authority and teamwork — is still, in different words, the mission today.