Every entry in the Defense records system exists because some decision needed a documented basis, and DD Form 1553 is one of those instruments: DD Form 1553, Entry for a Photography Contest, August 1983., created to Entry for a Photography Contest. The reason it carries a DD number rather than a service designation is structural — the Department maintains a single body of forms for matters that arise identically in every service, so that a record created in one component remains intelligible in another.
This is why the arrangement matters to you rather than only to the archivists. not stated governs the form throughout the Department, with not stated as the responsible office, so the record you create is legible outside your own component. Joint assignments, agency details and cross-service transactions all depend on that: the paperwork does not have to be reconstructed each time it crosses a boundary.
Current edition: not stated, status not stated. Understand why that date is worth attention here. When the Department reissues a form, the replacement takes effect across every component simultaneously, so an older copy is not merely locally out of date — it is out of date in every office that might receive it.
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.
Before the first entry, compare the date printed on the form face with not stated. This is not bureaucratic fussiness. Editions change field numbering, and a receiving office working from the current layout may look for information where your copy does not put it. On a Department form the exposure is wider than usual: your record may be reviewed by an office in another service entirely, one with no reason to remember what the previous edition looked like.
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 2 pages and asks for approximately 27 entries. The plurality of formats is deliberate: Defense distribution has never been able to assume one operating environment across the whole force.
Fillable and printable are not two presentations of one file but two different objects. One holds your entries as structured data within the document; the other is a static picture meant to meet a pen. Since a DD form frequently moves outside the organization that created it, the durability of the entry matters more here than on a record that stays in one drawer. Typed text reproduces indefinitely; handwriting degrades at every copy.
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
- Armed service. Press space bar to mark X in first box if Army, second box if Navy, third box if Air Force.
- Military address (organization, unit, installation, base, ship, state, country, P O, A P O, etc.) (include zip code).
- Area code of home telephone number.
- Remaining numbers of home telephone number.
- Duty phone: commercial area code.
- Remaining numbers of commercial duty phone number.
- Permanent home address (include zip code). (If release from service is anticipated before December 31 of the contest year, give approximate date and mailing address).
- Section 1, Contestant information and authorization. Title of entry.
- Name of contestant (last, first, middle initial).
- Rank (by name, for example, Staff Sergeant).
- Social security number.
- Duty phone: DSN.
- Categories of competition. a. Mark X if military life.
- b. Mark X if people.
- c. Mark X if scenic/nature.
- d. Mark X if creative effects.
- Type of entry (group). 1. Mark X if Monochrome print.
- Mark X if Group 2, color print.
- Mark X if group 3, color transparency.
- Signature of contestant.
- Date (year, month, day).
- Signature of model.
- Address (street, city, state and zip code). (or "NA" if not applicable).
- Date (year, month, day).
The completed form goes to the office named in not stated or in local implementing procedure, and it is worth keeping a copy before it goes. On a Department form the destination is frequently outside your own chain — another service, a defense agency, a joint staff — and recovering a document that has crossed an organizational boundary is a slower business than retrieving one from a file down the hall.
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.
Understanding why editions change explains why checking them is not optional. Revision follows directive reissue, changes in what data is required, and amendments to mandatory notice text — decisions made at Department level and communicated through publication rather than notification. The file you saved does not update itself, so the edition date at download is what you rely on.
What you have here is the document and a description of it, which is a different thing from guidance. This page is not an organ of the Department, gives no legal or procedural advice, and makes no representation about the outcome of any filing; the offices that administer the requirement are the only ones positioned to answer that. Applicability, eligibility and procedural questions belong to not stated, to your servicing personnel office, or to the office designated in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 1553?
- DD Form 1553, Entry for a Photography Contest, August 1983.
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?