text: The news report of the groping and earlier incidents prompted Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Boorda in November to order units around the world to spend a day reviewing Navy behavior standards. Following the murder of the couple near Fort Bragg, Army Secretary Togo West ordered the Army Inspector General to conduct a service-wide investigation into the prevalence of white supremacist and hate groups within the ranks.
  The Army study is to be completed March 1. The Navy reviews were completed Dec. 8. The problems have continued. "The litany is pretty awful," said Don Abenheim, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, a Stanford University think tank. "There's really no excuse. The violence ... it's just outrageous."
  The military's crime rate is difficult to compare with the civilian world's. Each service maintains statistics differently - some by fiscal year, others by calendar year. The Navy was unable to supply figures showing how many crimes of specific types, such as murder, had been committed in specific years.
  But information supplied by the other services and a characterization of the Navy's situation by Boorda show that while the military's crime rate is generally down, the percentage of trials for crimes of violence has risen in the Navy and Marines, but fallen in the Air Force. In the Army, the numbers of robberies, burglaries, arsons and incidents of drug dealing and abuse all rose, while murders remained stable, according to 1994 statistics, the most recent available. Abenheim doesn't see 1995's crimes as the first wave of a general breakdown in order and discipline. "There are always problems with discipline," he said. "If you took any population of 1.7 million people, you would have these incidents. One shouldn't overstate it." Abenheim said the number of current problems pales in comparison to the rash of drug abuse, racism and violence that swept through the military in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
  "There will always be racists in the military, as in the civilian world," said Charlie Moskos, a sociology professor at Northwestern University, veteran, and lifetime observer of the military. "You have more racial achievement than anywhere else. These incidents are given more attention because they are so rare."
  But the string of highly publicized incidents concerns Abenheim, who sees a "cult of violence" developing within the military.
  "In the military, one has to be extra careful to combine military virtue within a very limited framework so that this violence is used only for national security purposes," he said. "How do you get people to kill or risk their own lives, and yet keep them under control in a disciplined way as soldiers?"
  Control may be a function of attitude. Moskos and others say the creation of the all-volunteer military in 1972 may have sparked a change in that attitude, creating an atmosphere inadvertently conducive to extremist activity. "The end of the draft meant there would be no more white liberals in the ranks," said Moskos, whose 1956 Princeton graduating class sent 500 people into the military. Last year's class sent 13. "That sets a different tone. There isn't that kind of counterbalancing influence in the ranks any more."