DD Form 2993 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is Environmental Baseline Survey (EBS) Checklist, and it exists to Environmental Baseline Survey (EBS) Checklist. 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.
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.
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.
Signature is the point at which a completed form becomes a certification, and the requirement follows from that. On paper it means ink in the designated block; electronically it means a credentialed digital signature, ordinarily applied with a Common Access Card in software that supports it. A name typed into the signature field is data, not an act — it demonstrates nothing about who entered it. The date beside the signature fixes when the certification was made, which is why a signed but undated block is treated as incomplete.
The defects that return forms are the same ones year after year: a superseded edition, required fields left blank, handwriting that fails on reproduction, dates in a convention the form did not ask for, and certification without a signature or without a date. Where a specific field is genuinely unclear, the instructions printed on the form come first and not stated governs where the two do not agree.
Download the form
The set published here is PDF, covering unknown pages with roughly unknown 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.
Two states of the same page circulate, and the reason is worth knowing. In the fillable pdf, the boxes are real fields holding real data; in the printable pdf, the boxes are drawings. Where a record will cross components — as Department records regularly do — the typed version is the safer artifact. Each scan, each forwarding, each reproduction costs handwriting a little legibility, and the office that finally files the record is rarely the office that received it first.
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.
Editions change for reasons that originate above the form itself. The prescribing directive is reissued and the form follows; the information the Department needs to collect changes and the fields change with it; the statutory notice language is amended and every form carrying that notice is republished. None of these events announces itself to the person who downloaded a copy last year, which is why confirming not stated at the moment of download is the only reliable check available to you.
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 2993?
- Environmental Baseline Survey (EBS) Checklist
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?