Cadre

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En cadre is a military expression for a group around whom a unit is formed, or a training staff. For other uses of the term, see Cadre (disambiguation).

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Cadre (from the French; pronounced /ˈkɑːdreɪ/) is the backbone of an organization, usually a political or military organization. The expression can be in the singular or the plural. Generally it is applied to a small core of committed and experienced people who are capable of providing leadership and of training newer members.

Because cadre are well developed in terms of knowledge, experience, and agreement with the organization's goals, they should be able to adapt and rebuild the organization's structure and ideological direction even if the organization has been weakened, through, for example, other members being killed or imprisoned. For professional revolutionaries the cadre consider themselves subject to the discipline and self-discipline of a political vanguard party model.

Radical Left movements in particular have maintained their minimum program of survival and growth very effectively through the strength of a cadre system. Basic success within a movement in which cadre are the vanguard comes when one core of cadre has gradually recruited and trained another group of cadre to ensure the perpetuation of the movement. This, in theory, both strengthens the movement politically and promotes a culture of emulation over that of competition. The drawback of the cadre system is the inevitable ossification of the ideology as competition is eliminated, and the cadre becoming a separate caste, "a state within a state". In the Soviet Union, the cadre usage led into apparatschik system with the Party nomenklatura becoming a separate elite with little contact interface to general populace.

Cadres existed historically in Communist China as small factions of Mao Zedong's Communist Party who could maintain the party for as long as needed.

The term is also commonly used in other venues to indicate an "original" or "leadership" group, i.e. the "first set" of users of a system who then will act as the seed-group who gain initial experience with a system, in order to facilitate its later use by a more general population. An example would be the "Initial Cadre" of pilots trained in a new airplane by the manufacturer, in advance of the more formal training that later pilots of the type might undergo at the airline, i.e. "users", level. The term in this case assumes that the group is able to explore a system and determine by experimentation what later standards will be used to train the follow-on users, and further connotates that the original group will then train the instructors who will then interface with the final users group. The term has the additional connotation of "initial" or "original".