About This Site

Why this exists

For two decades, servicemembers setting up a CAC at home have relied on community resources that grew organically — enormously helpful, but sprawling, dated in design, and full of instructions for software that no longer exists. MilitarySmartCards.com is a fresh start on the same mission: a clear, current, no-nonsense guide to getting your Common Access Card working on your own computer.

Principles

• Current first. Guidance targets today's operating systems and browsers. History lives in git, not in the guides.
• Plain English. You shouldn't need to know what PKCS#11 is to log into webmail. (If you want to know, we'll tell you.)
• Official sources win. Certificates come from DISA, policy comes from your service, and this site links out rather than mirroring things that can go stale.
• Nothing collected. No accounts, no forms, no analytics that identify you, and absolutely never your PIN or personal data. This is a static informational site.
• Open source. Every page is in a public repository. If something is wrong or out of date, anyone can fix it.

What this site is not

• Not an official DoD, DISA, or DMDC website, and not affiliated with or endorsed by any government agency.
• Not affiliated with MilitaryCAC.com — that is a separate, long-running community site with its own maintainer.
• Not a help desk. We can't see your system, reset your PIN, or grant you access to anything.
• Not a place for CUI or anything sensitive — and no guide here requires it.

Contributing

Found an error, a dead link, or a gap? Open an issue or a pull request on GitHub. Especially valuable: confirming steps on OS versions we haven't retested lately, and reporting when DISA rotates certificates or tools change names.

License

The site's content and code are released under the MIT license. Use it, copy it, improve it.