Military Forms Guide

DD Form 1910 — DD Form 1910, Clearance Request for Public Release of Department of Defense Information, April 2016

Clearance Request for Public Release of Department of Defense Information

DD Form 1910 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is DD Form 1910, Clearance Request for Public Release of Department of Defense Information, April 2016, and it exists to Clearance Request for Public Release of Department of Defense Information. 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.

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a form, the replacement takes effect across every component simultaneously, so an older copy is not merely locally out of date — it is out of date in every office that might receive it.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.

Fill all of it, marking inapplicable items N/A. A record with gaps cannot later demonstrate whether the gap was a decision or an oversight, which is exactly the ambiguity documentation exists to remove. Dates go in the form's own format — on a document that crosses service lines, an ambiguous date is a real hazard rather than a pedantic one.

Understand what the Privacy Act Statement is doing on the page. It exists because collecting personal data from an individual triggers a duty to explain the collection: under what authority, for what purpose, to whom the information may routinely go, and whether you are obliged to answer. That explanation precedes the fields for the obvious reason — afterwards it is merely a notice, beforehand it is a basis for deciding.

The signature converts entries into an attestation, and that is why its form is prescribed. Ink, or a digital signature carrying a credential that identifies the signer — commonly issued on a Common Access Card. Typed characters in the box satisfy neither standard, because the whole value of a signature lies in being difficult to produce on someone else's behalf. Date it as you sign; an undated attestation cannot be placed in the sequence of events.

Recurring defects have a pattern to them, and it is mostly the pattern of a record that cannot be relied on: an edition that does not match, gaps that cannot be interpreted, entries that cannot be read after scanning, dates that could mean two things, and a certification nobody executed. For an ambiguous field, read the form's own instruction, then not stated, which controls.

Download the form

The set published here is PDF, covering 2 pages with roughly 39 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.

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

  • 1. Document description. a. Type.
  • 1.b. Title.
  • 1.c. Page Count.
  • 1.d. Subject Area.
  • 2. Author/speaker. a. Name (last, first, middle initial).
  • 2.b. Rank.
  • 2.c. Title.
  • 2.d. Office.
  • 2.e. Agency.
  • 3. Presentation/Publication Data (date, place, event).
  • 5. Prior Coordination. a. Name (last, first, middle initial), line 1.
  • 5.b. Office/agency.
  • 5.c. Telephone number (include area code) (or DSN).
  • 5.a. Name, line 2.
  • 5.b. Office/agency.
  • 5.c. Telephone number (include area code) (or DSN).
  • 5.a. Name, line 3.
  • 5.b. Office/agency.
  • 5.c. Telephone number (include area code) (or DSN).
  • 5.a. Name, line 4.
  • 5.b. Office/agency.
  • 5.c. Telephone number (include area code) (or DSN).
  • 5.a. Name, line 5.
  • 5.b. Office/agency.

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.

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.

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.

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 1910?
DD Form 1910, Clearance Request for Public Release of Department of Defense Information, April 2016
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