DD Form 1685 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is DD Form 1685, Data Exchange and/or Proposed Revision of Catalog , August 1993, and it exists to Data Exchange and/or Proposed Revision of Catalog Data. 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a form, the replacement takes effect across every component simultaneously, so an older copy is not merely locally out of date — it is out of date in every office that might receive it.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.
Verify the printed edition against not stated first. Field structure shifts between editions, and the office that receives your record is reading the current one. That office may sit outside your service, which removes even the informal accommodation you might expect from a colleague who used the old version last month.
For an ambiguous field, read the form's own instruction, then not stated, which controls.
Download the form
What you can download: PDF. The form runs 2 pages and asks for approximately 112 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.
If you find an xfdl file here, its presence is historical. The format belongs to IBM Lotus Forms, which the Department adopted Department-wide for electronic forms and fielded on a scale that makes wholesale removal slow. You need the matching viewer to open it; ordinary pdf software cannot read the format and will say so unhelpfully.
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
- Enter M O E rule to be deleted.
- 5.b., line 1 of 6. Mark X if used.
- 5.b., line 1. Enter L to R.
- 5.b., line 1. Enter C A G E code.
- 5.b., line 1. Enter proposed reference numbers.
- 5.b., line 1. R N F C
- 5.b., line 1. R N C C
- 5.b., line 1. R N V C
- 5.b., line 1. D A C
- 5.b., line 1. R N S C
- 5.b., line 1. R N A A C
- 5.b., line 2. Mark X if used.
- 5.b., line 3. Mark X if used.
- 5.b., line 4. Mark X if used.
- 5.b., line 5. Mark X if used.
- 5.b., line 6. Mark X if used.
- 5.b., line 2. Enter L to R.
- 5.b., line 3. Enter L to R.
- 5.b., line 4. Enter L to R.
- 5.b., line 5. Enter L to R.
- 5.b., line 6. Enter L to R.
- 5.b., line 2. Enter C A G E code.
- 5.b., line 3. Enter C A G E code.
- 5.b., line 4. Enter C A G E code.
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.
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.
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.
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 1685?
- DD Form 1685, Data Exchange and/or Proposed Revision of Catalog , August 1993
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?