Demo 01 · Administrative work · Built

The award citation

An award citation is admin, which is the whole distinction. Nobody argues we should recognize fewer soldiers. The hour of formatting is the only part worth taking away. Draft one below, then check it the way you would have to before signing your name to it.

What you'll do · about two minutes

1
See the taskread
2
Give it the factsyour turn
3
Read the draftreview
4
Verify & signyour turn
1
Step 1 · Read

What this costs today

Award citations follow a fixed structure under Army Regulation 600-8-22: a set opening by award, a third-person body, and a standard closing line. The facts take five minutes: what the soldier did, over what period. Then you burn the rest on voice and line count, and it comes back anyway. Most get written late, by a squad or platoon leader who would rather be doing almost anything else.

~30–60 minto hand-write one citation in format
~10 minto verify and sign a drafted one, fact by fact
33k–83k hrsreturned per 100,000 citations†

† Author's estimate from the times above; the Army publishes no annual citation count, so the figure is per 100,000 instances. Assumes recovered hours are protected from new tasking.

2
Step 2 · Your turn

Give the assistant the facts

Do this: press Load example & draft for the fast path, or fill the seven fields below and press Draft citation. Either way you land on a finished draft in step 3.

In a hurry? Load a filled-in example and skip straight to the draft. It plants one deliberate error for you to catch.

Or enter your own. Just the facts a leader would already have. No regulation language, no formatting; that part is the template’s job. Leave a field blank and the draft shows you the gap. A tool that quietly fills in what it was never told is the thing we are trying to avoid, so this one will not do it.

3
Step 3 · Review

Read what it wrote

Waiting on step 2. Draft a citation above and it will appear here.

The template pulls the set opening for the award you picked, works your facts into the body in third person, and adds the standard closing line.

Fill the form above, or load the example, then draft.
Assembled in your browser from what you typed and nothing else. This is an illustrative template standing in for the accredited platforms the Department fielded in 2025.
4
Step 4 · Your turn

Verify every fact, then sign

Waiting on step 2. Once you have a draft, each fact you supplied appears here for individual confirmation.

The model never decides who earns an award. On this page you cannot sign until you have confirmed every fact against the draft, one at a time. That friction is on purpose. We have all clicked "I acknowledge" without reading it, and nobody needs another one of those.

Draft first. Each fact you entered will appear here for individual confirmation.
Draft statusNo draft yet
Drafted byAssistant (illustrative template) - first draft only
Facts confirmed0 of 0
Edits to draft0
Verified & signed by- pending -

Signed. Here is what that cost you.

your time, draft to signature
facts you personally confirmed
30–60 minto write this by hand, in format

You still did the part that mattered. Every fact came from you, and your name is on it. The typing went away. So did the version of this where a tired leader signs from memory at 1900 on a Friday and nobody can reconstruct what was checked.

The thing types. You still pick who gets the medal. This page runs a small template in your browser. No real soldier data, no judgment about merit. The real version would run on the platforms the Department has already accredited, and the signature and the liability would still belong to a person.
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