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DD Form 2864 is a Department of Defense form, not a service form: VSI Beneficiary Designation, used to VSI Beneficiary Designation. 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.
not stated is the prescribing publication and not stated the office responsible for the document. Deadlines belong to local implementing guidance, not to either of those, so a submission date is a question for the receiving office.
Edition not stated, status not stated. That comparison is the first thing worth making, because a DD form supersedes centrally and an old copy in a shared drive is out of date for every office, not just yours.
Available: PDF, across unknown pages, roughly unknown fields. That is the whole scope of the download decision.
Fillable pdf is the default choice. Its boxes hold typed entries inside the document; the printable release is a static image of the same page with no interactive layer. Since DD forms routinely cross between services and agencies before they are filed, typed entries matter more here than on a form that stays inside one office.
Xfdl is a legacy Department format, IBM Lotus Forms, requiring the matching viewer. Its survival in DD distribution reflects how widely it was fielded across the Department, not any advantage over pdf today.
Nothing costs anything here. Work in a full desktop pdf application rather than a browser preview; field behaviour in browsers is unreliable.
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.
Mark inapplicable items N/A rather than leaving white space. Use the date format the form specifies. This matters more on Department forms than on service forms: the record may be reviewed by personnel outside your branch who share none of your office conventions.
Read the Privacy Act Statement before entering identifiers, not after. Four facts are in it: authority, purpose, routine uses, consequence of declining. Its placement ahead of the data fields is deliberate.
Certification closes the form. Ink on paper, or a digital signature — normally CAC-applied — in software that supports it. Typed text in the signature box is a name, not an execution. Enter the date beside it before closing the file.
Review for the usual: old edition, blank required fields, illegibility on reproduction, date format, signature and date. Unclear entries — read the form face, then not stated; the directive prevails.
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.
A number is a complete address in the DD series. Because the sequence is Department-level and not duplicated per service, there is nothing further to specify.
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 2864?
- VSI Beneficiary Designation
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?