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DA Form 7578 belongs to the DA series of Department of the Army publications. Its official title is UNIT DEMILITARIZATION CERTIFICATION AND VERIFICATION CERTIFICATE, and its stated purpose is unit demilitarization certification and verification certificate. Edition in force: 01/01/2006. Publication status: ACTIVE. Length is 1 page(s), with roughly 121 fields available for entry.
The office of primary responsibility is G-4. Use is prescribed by AR 700-144, which defines when the form is raised and where it goes afterward. The form is normally completed by the subject of the entries or by administrative personnel maintaining the record, then reviewed and signed as the governing authority directs.
Formats offered: PDF, XFDL. All are the same published layout in different containers, and the choice between them is a matter of how the entries will be made rather than what appears on the page. The pdf serves as the authoritative rendering. A fillable pdf exposes editable fields on screen; a printable pdf is the blank form as a flat page for handwriting.
Any modern browser or reader will display a pdf. Interactive fields behave more predictably in a standalone reader than in an in-browser viewer, which sometimes shows fields it cannot store. An xfdl copy is published as well. It is IBM Lotus Forms, the format carried by several Army systems, and it needs the Lotus Forms Viewer; pdf readers and word processors will not open it.
All formats are free to download and no registration is involved. The files are the published documents, distributed unmodified.
What the form asks for
- CERTNAME
- ContentArea1
- ITEM
- ITEM_1
- ITEM_10
- ITEM_11
- ITEM_12
- ITEM_13
- ITEM_14
- ITEM_15
- ITEM_2
- ITEM_3
- ITEM_4
- ITEM_5
- ITEM_6
- ITEM_7
- ITEM_8
- ITEM_9
- NSN
- NSN_1
- NSN_10
- NSN_11
- NSN_12
- NSN_13
Entry proceeds block by block in the order printed on the page. Identifying particulars occupy the head of the form: name, identification number, unit or organisation, and date of preparation. These fields govern how the record is later retrieved from the file, so they are completed before any substantive block.
Interactive fields are filled by typing into them. Movement between fields is by tab, following the order established when the form was constructed, which usually tracks the page layout. Check boxes and radio groups are set by clicking, and exclusive groups permit one selection at a time. A one-line field has no wrap: text beyond its width prints truncated even when the screen shows it. Overlong content is placed in remarks or on a continuation, not forced into the field.
The signature block is the final entry, made by hand or by an authorised electronic method, and without it the document remains a draft. Countersignatures — review, approval, witness — are added in the sequence printed, dated at the moment of signing and not at preparation. Empty mandatory fields lead the list of defects; an inapplicable field is annotated as such, not passed over. Behind it come digit transposition in identification numbers, day-month inversion in dates, and residual entries surviving from a reused copy in place of a blank form.
A Privacy Act statement appears on the form where personal information is collected. It sets out the authority for collection, the purpose, the routine uses, and whether disclosure is mandatory or voluntary. The statement is read before entry, not after. Completed copies carry personal data and are handled and stored under the safeguards applicable to that data.
Disposition of the completed document follows the prescribing authority — delivery to the office it names, transmission through the unit administrative channel, or placement in the individual's record, according to circumstance. The preparer keeps a copy. Retention is governed by the applicable records schedule, not by office custom.
Related forms are found by series and number. Documents in the DA series sharing a proponent or a prescribing directive commonly travel together, and a form referenced within the body of another is usually filed with it. Continuation sheets, cover sheets, and transmittal documents belong to this group and are collected before submission rather than after.
An edition stands until the proponent issues a revision. The printed edition date identifies the version, and a copy held locally is checked against the edition now in force before reuse. Prior executions under a superseded edition are not reopened for that reason.
The files here are reproductions of published Department of the Army documents, provided for download. This site is not part of the Department of the Army and issues no forms of its own. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and no representation is made as to acceptance of a document by any office. Where an entry, a requirement, or a question of eligibility is in doubt, the proponent or the servicing administrative office answers it.
Questions and answers
- What is DA Form 7578?
- UNIT DEMILITARIZATION CERTIFICATION AND VERIFICATION CERTIFICATE
- Which edition is current?
- 01/01/2006
- Who is responsible for this form?
- G-4
- In which formats can it be downloaded?
- PDF, XFDL, PDF