DD Form 878 occupies a particular place in Defense recordkeeping. Its title is Military Mail Dispatched, and it exists to Military Mail Dispatched. 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.
Work down the page in the printed order, and understand why the order exists. The identifying block establishes whose record this is and under what circumstances it arises. The body of the form then answers questions that are only meaningful once that context is fixed. The signature block comes last because a certification signed before the entries are complete certifies nothing.
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.
For an ambiguous field, read the form's own instruction, then not stated, which controls.
Download the form
What you can download: PDF. The form runs unknown pages and asks for approximately unknown entries. The plurality of formats is deliberate: Defense distribution has never been able to assume one operating environment across the whole force.
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 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.
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.
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 878?
- Military Mail Dispatched
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?