DD Form 1610 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is DD Form 1610, Request and Authorization for TDY Travel of DoD Personnel, May 2003`, and it exists to Request and Authorization for TDY Travel of DoD Personnel. 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.
The practical effect of Department-level issue is interoperability. not stated establishes the requirement across the Defense enterprise; not stated keeps the document current for all of it. No service maintains its own variant, which means a completed record travels between components — service to agency, agency to joint command — and arrives in a format the receiving office already knows how to read.
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a form, the replacement takes effect across every component simultaneously, so an older copy is not merely locally out of date — it is out of date in every office that might receive it.
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.
Unclear entries are resolved from the printed instructions first and from not stated where the two texts diverge.
Download the form
Formats available: PDF, across 2 pages and about 46 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.
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
- 3. Social security number of requestor. Include dashes.
- 1. Date of request (four digit year, two digit month, two digit day).
- Request for Official Travel. 2. Name of requestor (last, first, middle initial)
- 5. Location of permanent duty station.
- 6. Organizational element.
- 7. Duty telephone number. Include area code.
- 8. Type of authorization.
- 9. T.D.Y. purpose. See JTR, appendix H.
- 10.a. Approximate number of T.D.Y. days including travel time.
- 10.b. Proceed date. Four digit year, two digit month, two digit day.
- 11. Travel itinerary.
- Press space bar to mark X if variation from itinerary is authorized.
- 12. Transportation mode. a. Commercial. Mark X if by rail.
- Mark X if by air.
- Mark X if by bus.
- Mark X if by ship.
- b. Government travel. Mark X if by air.
- Mark X if by government vehicle.
- Mark X if by ship.
- c. Local transportation. Mark X if by rental car.
- Mark X if by taxi.
- Mark X if other local transportation.
- If local transportation is by privately owned conveyance, enter rate per mile.
- Privately owned conveyance. X first box if advantageous to the government, second if reimbursement is limited to cost of common carrier transportation and per diem.
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.
Cross-referenced documents are found by series and number, with nothing further required. That the DD sequence is unified across the Department means a cited number identifies one form and no other, which is the practical payoff of centralizing the numbering in the first place.
It helps to see the DA and DD sequences as what they are: separate registries with separate custodians. One serves a single service under a service proponent, the other serves the Department under not stated or an equivalent office, and neither was ever indexed against the other. A number that appears in both systems points to two unrelated documents, which is why reading the prefix comes before reading the digits.
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 1610?
- DD Form 1610, Request and Authorization for TDY Travel of DoD Personnel, May 2003`
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?