Military Forms Guide

DD Form 1811 — DD Form 1811, Pre-Award Survey of Contractor's or Carrier's Facilities and Equipment, June 1979.

Pre-Award Survey of Contractor's/Carrier's Facilities and Equipment

DD Form 1811 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is DD Form 1811, Pre-Award Survey of Contractor's or Carrier's Facilities and Equipment, June 1979., and it exists to Pre-Award Survey of Contractor's/Carrier's Facilities and Equipment. 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.

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.

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.

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

The set published here is PDF, covering 1 pages with roughly 81 fields. More than one format survives because the Department serves users under very different conditions, from a desk with current software to a location where a printer is the only reliable output.

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.

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

  • S. C. A. C.
  • Fire protection. Fire contents rate, based on 80 percent co-insurance per $100.00 per year.
  • Date (year/month/day).
  • Name and address of firm, include zip code.
  • Name of operating executive.
  • Business telephone number, including area code.
  • Home telephone number, including area code.
  • Address of storage location, include zip code.
  • Warehouse number.
  • Area, floor, fire division, etc.
  • Warehouse license number.
  • Operating authority.
  • Hour and days of week open for business.
  • Pick up and delivery equipment. Number of trucks, line 1.
  • Number of trucks, line 2.
  • Number of trucks, line 3.
  • Type of trucks, line 1.
  • Type of trucks, line 2.
  • Type of trucks, line 3.
  • D. O. D. fire classification code.
  • Weight limitation in pounds.
  • Number of miles to nearest fire department.
  • Nearest fire hydrant. Number of feet from building.
  • Pounds of pressure.

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.

When DD Form 1811 cites another form, the citation is self-sufficient. The DD series is a single sequence administered at Department level, so the number resolves to exactly one document without any need to establish which component issued it — a convenience that exists only because the sequence was never allowed to fork.

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 1811?
DD Form 1811, Pre-Award Survey of Contractor's or Carrier's Facilities and Equipment, June 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?
PDF

Other forms in the series