The Army and Navy Academy's campus sits directly on the Carlsbad coast, with the Pacific visible from the parade ground. This positioning was not accidental: the school's military identity has always been connected to the sea, and the campus geography reinforces it. Cadets drill within sight of the ocean. The campus covers several city blocks and includes dormitories, academic buildings, a chapel, and athletic facilities that have been expanded over the decades as enrollment and finances allowed. The school operates for grades 7 through 12, with boarding students living on campus and day students available to local families. The transition to Carlsbad in 1936 coincided with the town's own growth; the school and the city have been institutional neighbors for nearly ninety years.

Among the Army and Navy Academy's most recognized programs is its drill team, which has competed nationally and received recognition that military schools take seriously. Precision drill — the coordinated execution of rifle handling and movement by a team in formation — requires the kind of sustained attention and coordination that translates, in theory, to other domains. The school makes this argument explicitly in its marketing and alumni communications. Whether it holds is a question every alumni reunion answers differently. What the drill team record demonstrates is that a school in a beach town in southern California has built something replicable year after year — a program that produces performance, if not always the exact outcomes that performance was supposed to predict.

Richard Boone, who played the gunslinger Paladin in the television series Have Gun – Will Travel, attended the academy. Victor Villaseñor, whose memoir Rain of Gold told the story of his family's immigration from Mexico, attended. Noah Gragson, who races NASCAR Cup Series, attended. Marc McClure, who played Jimmy Olsen in the Christopher Reeve Superman films, attended. The list reflects the school's geographic position in Southern California — close enough to Los Angeles that entertainment careers are not unusual outcomes — and its era. Most of these names come from a period when a military boarding school in Carlsbad was a plausible step toward whatever came next. The current school continues to produce graduates, though the culture that made military boarding schools a standard option for certain kinds of families has shifted considerably since 1910.