Consider what a Department-level form is for. DD Form 2710 — DD Form 2710, Prisoner Background Summary, March 2013 — was established to Prisoner Background Summary, and it was placed in the DD sequence because the underlying transaction occurs throughout the Defense establishment in substantially the same shape. Standardizing the record was cheaper and more reliable than letting six services each design their own.
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.
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.
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
The set published here is PDF, covering 5 pages with roughly 200 fields.
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
- 3. Maiden name.
- 4. Nickname.
- 5. Aliases.
- 6. Age.
- 8. Sex. Press space bar to mark X in first box if male, second box if female.
- 8. Place of birth (city, county, state).
- 9. Date of birth (4 digit year, 2 digit month, 2 digit day).
- 10. Race. X if American Indian/Alaska native.
- X if Asian.
- X if black or African American.
- X if native Hawaiian or other Pacific islander.
- X if white.
- X if unknown (reviewer of form will mark if prisoner does not answer).
- 11. Ethnicity. X first box if Hispanic or Latino, second box if not Hispanic or Latino, or third box if unknown.
- 12. Nationality.
- 13. Religion.
- 14. Height.
- 15. Weight.
- 16. Identifying marks (scars, tattoos, etc.). X first box if no, second box if yes.
- 17. Hair color. X first box if auburn, second box if black, third box if blond, fourth box if brown, fifth box if gray, sixth box if red, seventh box if silver, eighth box if white, or ninth box if bald.
- 18. Eye color. X first box if black, second box if blue, third box if brown, fourth box if green, fifth box if gray, sixth box if hazel, or seventh box if violet.
- 19. Gang association: X first box if no, second box if yes.
- Gang name/location (City, state).
- 20. Cult/extremist association: X first box if no, second box if yes.
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.
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.
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 2710?
- DD Form 2710, Prisoner Background Summary, March 2013
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?