DD Form 1265 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is DD Form 1265, Request for Convoy Clearance, September 1998, and it exists to Request For Convoy Clearance. What the DD prefix records is an administrative judgment made long before your copy was printed: this transaction was determined to be common to the whole Department rather than peculiar to one service, and so the documentation of it was standardized at Department level.
That decision has consequences you will notice. Because not stated prescribes the form for the Department as a whole, and not stated maintains it on the Department's behalf, the same blank passes between the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the Space Force, the Coast Guard when operating under Defense jurisdiction, the defense agencies and the combatant commands without translation. A clerk in one component reads a record created in another and finds the fields where they expect them.
You are looking for edition not stated, listed as not stated. Department-wide supersession is a single event rather than a rollout, which is what distinguishes edition currency on a DD form from the same question on a service publication: nobody anywhere is still accepting the previous version out of habit.
Work down the page in the printed order, and understand why the order exists. The identifying block establishes whose record this is and under what circumstances it arises. The body of the form then answers questions that are only meaningful once that context is fixed. The signature block comes last because a certification signed before the entries are complete certifies nothing.
Check the edition date before you type anything, against not stated. Old blanks accumulate in shared drives for years, and the cost of one is not obvious until a reviewer cannot find a field. Because DD forms are revised centrally and replaced across the Department in a single action, there is no component still tolerating the old layout as a local practice.
For an ambiguous field, read the form's own instruction, then not stated, which controls.
Download the form
Formats available: PDF, across 2 pages and about 141 fields. That several formats coexist is a consequence of scale — the Department cannot standardize the software on every desk that needs this form, so it standardizes the document instead.
Two states of the same page circulate, and the reason is worth knowing. In the fillable pdf, the boxes are real fields holding real data; in the printable pdf, the boxes are drawings. Where a record will cross components — as Department records regularly do — the typed version is the safer artifact. Each scan, each forwarding, each reproduction costs handwriting a little legibility, and the office that finally files the record is rarely the office that received it first.
The xfdl file is a survival from an earlier phase of Defense form automation. Xfdl is the IBM Lotus Forms format, and for a long period it was the Department's standard for electronic forms — fielded broadly enough that it still appears in distribution sets today. It opens in IBM Lotus Forms Viewer or a compatible client and nowhere else; a pdf reader will report it as damaged, which is not a fault in the file.
Nothing here is charged for. Published Defense forms are public documents and distribution carries no fee, in any format. One caution about software: fill the form in a desktop pdf application rather than a browser tab. Browser-embedded viewers implement field behaviour inconsistently, and the failure mode is silent loss of everything you entered.
What the form asks for
- 18. E T A and E T D at state lines, major road junctions, major bridges and tunnels, metropolitan areas and overnight halt sites. Continue on a separate sheet if additional space is required. a. location, line 1.
- 18.b. E T A, line 1
- 18.c. E T A date, line 1. (four digit year, two digit month, two digit day.)
- 18.d. E T D, line 1
- 18.d. E T D date, line 1
- 18.a. location, line 2
- 18.b. E T A, line 2
- 18.c. E T A date, line 2.
- 18.d. E T D, line 2
- 18.d. E T D date, line 2
- 18.a. location, line 3
- 18.a. location, line 4
- 18.a. location, line 5
- 18.a. location, line 6
- 18.b. E T A, line 3
- 18.b. E T A, line 4
- 18.b. E T A, line 5
- 18.b. E T A, line 6
- 18.c. E T A date, line 3.
- 18.c. E T A date, line 4.
- 18.c. E T A date, line 5.
- 18.c. E T A date, line 6.
- 18.d. E T D, line 3
- 18.d. E T D, line 4
Submission follows not stated and whatever local instruction supplements it. Make a copy before the original leaves. Department forms travel across organizational lines by design, and the administrative distance that makes them useful is the same distance that makes tracing a lost one difficult.
Forms referenced inside this one are located by number alone, and that simplicity is a direct product of Department-level numbering. Because the DD sequence is maintained centrally and not duplicated by service, a number is a complete address: one number, one document, throughout the Defense establishment.
Where a service form is cited in the same instruction, the two numbering systems should not be read across. DA numbering belongs to the Army and is administered by an Army proponent; DD numbering belongs to the Department and is administered by not stated or an equivalent Department office. The systems developed separately and were never harmonized, so identical digits in each identify two documents with nothing in common. The prefix, not the number, tells you which system you are in.
Editions change for reasons that originate above the form itself. The prescribing directive is reissued and the form follows; the information the Department needs to collect changes and the fields change with it; the statutory notice language is amended and every form carrying that notice is republished. None of these events announces itself to the person who downloaded a copy last year, which is why confirming not stated at the moment of download is the only reliable check available to you.
A word on what this page is. It distributes a published Department of Defense document and describes what the document contains and how it is completed. It is not the issuing authority, does not speak for one, and offers no legal advice; nothing written here determines whether a particular submission will be accepted, because that determination belongs entirely to the office receiving it. Questions of applicability, eligibility or procedure go to not stated, to your servicing personnel office, or to the office identified in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 1265?
- DD Form 1265, Request for Convoy Clearance, September 1998
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?