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DD Form 261 is a Department of Defense form, not a service form: DD Form 261, Report of Investigation Line of Duty and Misconduct Status, October 1995, used to Investigation, Report of - Line of Duty and Misconduct Status. The DD prefix is the operative fact. It means one blank serves every military department — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, Coast Guard under Defense jurisdiction — plus the defense agencies and combatant commands. No branch variant exists.
Authority: not stated prescribes it, not stated maintains it. Those two names settle most disputes about why the form is being asked for. Local commands add timing on top; the requirement itself comes from above them.
Current edition is not stated, carried as not stated. Check that against any copy you already hold before doing anything else — Department-level revisions land everywhere simultaneously, so a stale file is stale across the whole Department.
Formats: PDF. Length 2 pages, approximately 64 entries.
Skip xfdl unless the viewer is already installed. It is the IBM Lotus Forms format, adopted Department-wide for electronic forms and still present in the set for that reason; ordinary pdf software reports it as unreadable.
Nothing costs anything here. Work in a full desktop pdf application rather than a browser preview; field behaviour in browsers is unreliable.
What the form asks for
- 1. Report date (4 digit year, 2 digit month, 2 digit day).
- 2. Investigation of: press space bar to mark X in first box if injury, second box if disease, third box if illness, or fourth box if death.
- 3. Status. X first box if regular or EAD, second box if called or ordered to AD, third box if inactive duty training, or fourth box if short tour of active duty for training.
- If called or ordered to active duty: X first box if more than 30 days, or second box if 30 days or less.
- 3.c. Type of inactive duty training.
- Hour.
- Finish date (4 digit year, 2 digit month, 2 digit day).
- Hour.
- 4. To (Major Army or Air Force Commander).
- 8. Organization and station.
- d. LOD investigation made: X first box if yes, second box if no.
- 9. Other military personnel involved in the same incident. a. Name (last, first, middle initial), line 1.
- b. Social security number.
- c. Grade.
- d. LOD investigation made: X first box if yes, second box if no.
- a. Name, line 2.
- b. Social security number.
- c. Grade.
- a. Name, line 3.
- b. Social security number.
- c. Grade.
- d. LOD investigation made: X first box if yes, second box if no.
- 10. Basis for findings (as determined by investigation). a. Circumstances. (1) Hour.
- (2) Date (4 digit year, 2 digit month, 2 digit day).
Start by matching the printed date to not stated. Old blanks accumulate in shared folders for years. Because the Department reissues to all services in one action, nobody is still accepting the previous layout by local custom.
Fill top to bottom. Identification, then substance, then certification — lower fields commonly derive from the header, and completing out of order produces internal contradictions a reviewer will catch.
Complete every field, N/A where an item does not apply, dates exactly as the form prescribes. A DD form crosses service lines, and a convention obvious in one branch is not obvious in the next.
The Privacy Act Statement precedes the personal data fields for a reason. It gives the collection authority, the principal purpose, the routine uses and whether disclosure is voluntary or mandatory. Read it while the disclosure decision is still yours to make.
Sign last, in ink or with a credentialed digital signature. A typed name in a signature field certifies nothing. CAC-based signing is the usual electronic method where the receiving system supports it. Date the block immediately — unsigned and undated certifications account for a large share of returns.
Final pass, against the standing defect list: superseded edition, empty mandatory fields, handwriting illegible after scanning, non-conforming dates, missing signature or date. For anything ambiguous in a specific field, the form's own instructions come first and not stated controls where the two differ.
Submit to the office named in not stated or in local instruction; retain a duplicate before it leaves. Joint routing often sends a DD form across organizational boundaries, and tracing one afterward is not a same-day matter.
Related forms are found by number alone. The DD sequence is one unified Department-wide series, so a cited number resolves to exactly one document with no branch qualifier needed.
Where a procedure cites both a service form and a DD form, the two are unconnected. Service numbering answers to a service proponent, DD numbering to not stated or another Department office, and the two sequences were never aligned. Matching numbers mean nothing whatever.
Three drivers of revision: directive reissue, altered collection requirements, updated statutory notice text. No notification accompanies any of them, so download fresh and confirm not stated rather than reusing an archived file.
Limits of this page: it distributes a published Department of Defense document and describes it. No legal advice, no procedural ruling, no statement about whether any submission will be accepted. Applicability, eligibility and procedure belong to not stated, to a servicing personnel office, or to the office named in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 261?
- DD Form 261, Report of Investigation Line of Duty and Misconduct Status, October 1995
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?