Department of Defense (DoD) Country Codes
Department of Defense (DoD) Country Codes

This web page provides the Geopolitical Entities, Names, and Codes (GENC) Standard, Edition 3.0, Update 6:
https://nsgreg.nga.mil/doc/view?i=2624

On 23 January 2013 the DoD CIO-Chartered Architecture and Standards Review Group issued a memo to the Defense Information Systems Agency as the DoD Executive Agent for IT Standards that Mandated the use of three Country Code Standards for the DoD. The following excerpt is provided for clarification on the use of Country Codes in the DoD:

"In September 2008, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) withdrew support for the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 10-4, "Countries, Dependencies, Areas of Special Sovereignty, and Their Principal Administrative Divisions". Since this FIPS is no longer being updated, an effort was undertaken to develop new guidance to take the place of this standard. As a result of this effort, the DoD Information Technology (IT) Principals under the Architecture and Standards Review Group (ASRG), acting under the authority of the DoD Chief Information Officer (DoD CIO), have approved the following changes to take effect immediately.

The following three (3) standards are now mandated for use within the DoD:

  1. NGA.STND.0033_1.0: Geopolitical Entities, Names, and Codes (GENC) Standard, Edition 1.0
  2. ISO 3166-1:2006: Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions, Part 1: Country codes, 20 November 2006 [U.S. Government should implement GENC, not ISO 3166]
  3. ISO 3166-2:2007: Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions Part 2: Country subdivision code [U.S. Government should implement GENC, not ISO 3166]
In addition, the following standard has been retired:
  1. FIPS Pub 10-4 w/CNs 1-14: Countries, Dependencies, Areas of Special Sovereignty, and Their Principal Administrative Divisions, April 1995 as modified by Change Notice 1, 1 Dec 1998, through Change Notice 14, 31 July 2008."