[i] A guided tactical ballistic missile, the Corporal could deliver either a nuclear fission, high-explosive, fragmentation or chemical warhead up to a range of 75 nautical miles (139 km).

It was developed by the United States Army in partnership with Caltech's pioneering Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and initially produced by Douglas Aircraft Company.

The U.S. Army Ordnance California Institute Technology (ORDCIT) program that eventually produced the Corporal ballistic missile began in June 1944 with a contract to the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratories California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) to develop a ballistic guided missile.

GALCIT, later transformed into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), began incremental efforts starting with a solid-fuel rocket program called Private.

As the Corporal was a crash program and constantly under development after 1958 to reduce decomposition of the RFNA and improve performance, the propellants were changed to IRFNA (inhibited red fuming nitric acid), 14% NO2, 2.5% H2O, 0.6% HF and 82.9% HNO3 oxidizer, with 46.5% aniline, 46.5% furfuryl alcohol and 7% hydrazine as fuel.

The ground guidance system was a modified World War II SCR-584 radar which tracked the missile's position, as well as its slant range.

The Doppler radar was also used to send the final range correction and warhead arming command after the missile re-entered the atmosphere.

[14][15]A Corporal battalion was composed of 250 men requiring 35 vehicles to deploy and took nine hours to set up the missile to fire once the launch position had been reached.

Though Corporal I was deemed operable many shortcomings in both the missile and ground equipment tactical usability had become obvious during development.

[16] Engineer-User trials had shown that the primary reason for mechanical and electrical causes arose because the systems of the Corporal I were too delicate.

[29] Live-fire training for Germany-based US forces took place at Fort Bliss but later the British Royal Artillery Guided Weapons Range on the Scottish island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides was used.

Radar on Hirta (the main island of the St Kilda archipelago of Scotland) identified missile landing points.

A 1/40 scale plastic model kit of the Corporal missile with its mobile transporter was produced in the late 1950s and was reissued by Revell-Monogram in 2009.

A 1/48 scale plastic model kit of the Corporal missile with its launcher was produced in 1959 by Hawk and was reissued in 1969 in a glow in the dark version.