DD Form 1503 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is DD Form 1503, Message Correction Notice (JANAP 128), February 1979., and it exists to Message Correction Notice. 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.
The sequence printed on the form is the sequence in which a reviewer will read it, and the two should agree. Header data frames every entry below it; the substantive fields depend on that frame; the certification stands at the end because its whole function is to vouch for what came before. Entries made out of sequence commonly contradict entries made earlier.
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.
Unclear entries are resolved from the printed instructions first and from not stated where the two texts diverge.
Download the form
What you can download: PDF. The form runs 1 pages and asks for approximately 72 entries.
Xfdl appears in the set for reasons of institutional inertia rather than preference. It is the IBM Lotus Forms format, once the Department's electronic forms standard and deployed widely enough that it outlived the decision to move on. IBM Lotus Forms Viewer or an equivalent client opens it; a pdf application will not.
Every format is free, as published government documents are. A note on tools, though — the interactive field layer that makes a fillable pdf useful is precisely the part browser viewers handle least reliably. Save the file, open it in a full pdf reader, and the fields behave as the form's designer intended.
What the form asks for
- Date.
- To.
- From.
- Press space bar to mark X if attached message has been transmitted with discrepancies noted below, or second box if cannot be transmitted until discrepancies have been corrected.
- Mark X If General Is Precedence omitted, incorrectly entered, or invalid.
- Mark X If General Is Classification indicated cannot be transmitted
- Mark X If Classification indicated cannot be transmitted is By this station
- Mark X If Classification indicated cannot be transmitted Is To the Address
- Mark X If General Is Classification omitted or incorrectly entered.
- Mark X If General Is Addressee unidentifiable or invalid.
- Mark X If General Is Downgrading/declassification instructions omitted.
- Mark X If General Is Other
- Specify any other general discrepancy.
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND O C R PROCESSING) is Unauthorized plain language address.
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND OCR PROCESSING) is Unauthorized or invalid characters in heading or text
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND OCR PROCESSING) is Heading/text single spaced.
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND OCR PROCESSING) is Lower case letters.
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND OCR PROCESSING) is More than 69 characters per line.
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND OCR PROCESSING) is Message incomplete.
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND OCR PROCESSING) is Corrections not initialed.
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND OCR PROCESSING) is "MINIMIZE CONSIDERED" omitted.
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND OCR PROCESSING) is Releasers signature omitted.
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND OCR PROCESSING) is Page number block omitted or incorrectly entered.
- Mark X If NARRATIVE (MANUAL AND OCR PROCESSING) is Date-time group block omitted or incorrectly entered.
Route the executed form as not stated or local guidance directs, and retain a duplicate first. Cross-component routing is ordinary for DD forms, which is precisely why a personal copy earns its keep: the receiving office may belong to an organization you have no standing to query about a missing document.
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.
Procedures that touch both Department and service processes will cite forms from both sequences, and the coincidence of numbers between them is exactly that — coincidence. An Army proponent maintains the DA series for the Army; not stated or another Department office maintains the DD series for the whole Department. Two independent registries, two independent numbering runs, no correspondence at any value.
A form is downstream of the policy that requires it, and revision usually starts there: a directive is reissued, a collection requirement is altered, notice language is updated by statute. The form is republished as a consequence. Since none of that reaches individual users, an archived copy quietly becomes wrong, and verifying not stated each time you download is the whole remedy.
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 1503?
- DD Form 1503, Message Correction Notice (JANAP 128), February 1979.
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?