DD Form 2643 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is DD Form 2643, High Cost Foreign Lease, September 1993, and it exists to High Cost Foreign Lease. 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a form, the replacement takes effect across every component simultaneously, so an older copy is not merely locally out of date — it is out of date in every office that might receive it.
The form is laid out top to bottom in a sequence that reflects how the record will be read, not merely how it was drawn. Identification comes first because everything below it is understood in relation to a named person, unit or transaction; substantive entries follow; certification closes the document because certification attests to what precedes it. Filling out of order tends to produce internal inconsistencies — an entry that made sense before the header was settled and does not afterward.
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.
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.
The Privacy Act Statement is not boilerplate appended for legal cover; it is the mechanism by which a statutory obligation is discharged at the moment of collection. When the government asks an individual for personal information, it must state the authority under which it asks, the principal purpose, the routine uses to which the data may be put, and whether answering is voluntary or mandatory. Those four disclosures are placed ahead of the data fields deliberately, because the point of telling you is to inform a choice you have not yet made.
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.
Every item on the standing defect list undermines the record in the same way — it leaves a question the file cannot answer later. Obsolete edition, empty mandatory boxes, illegible scanned handwriting, non-conforming dates, missing signature or date. 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 1 pages and about 39 fields.
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.
All of it downloads without charge. Where care is needed is in the reader you choose. A fillable pdf depends on field properties that desktop applications honour and browser previews frequently ignore, so work locally rather than inside a browser window.
What the form asks for
- 1. Effective date.
- 2. Lease number.
- 3. Quarters I D code.
- Section 1 - Position Data. 4. Position normally assigned to unit.
- 5. Normal grade for position.
- Section 2 - Present Incumbent. 6. Name.
- 7. Grade.
- 8. Scheduled arrival date.
- 9. Date tour ends.
- 10. Organization assignment.
- 11. Gender and age of dependents (except spouse).
- Section 3 - Component Leasing Unit. 12. DoD component.
- 13. Executive agent (installation/MACOM administering lease agreement).
- 14. Reason for lease. Press space bar to mark X in first box if special command position, second box if country requirement, third box if attache system, fourth box if undue hardship, or fifth box if other.
- If other reason, explain.
- Section 4 - Lease Data. 15. Address (include apartment number, city, state, country and 9 digit zip code).
- 16. Gross square feet.
- 17. Net square feet.
- 18. Number of bedrooms
- 19. Number of full baths.
- 20. Number of half baths.
- 21. Land square footage.
- 22. Unit type. X first box if detached, second box if high rise, third box if duplex, etc.
- 23. Distance from work site. a. Miles.
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.
When DD Form 2643 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.
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.
The role of this page is narrow and worth stating plainly. It makes a published Defense form available and explains its structure. It does not advise, does not interpret policy for your circumstances, and cannot indicate how any office will treat a completed copy — those judgments rest with the authorities that own the process. Direct such questions to not stated, to the administrative office that services you, or to the authority named in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 2643?
- DD Form 2643, High Cost Foreign Lease, September 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?