Military Branch Arrest Rates Compared: Does the Army Have the Most Arrests?
No public, complete dataset proves that the Army has the highest arrest rate of every U.S. military branch. The Army often has the highest raw total in military crime and discipline categories because it is the largest active-duty branch. But raw totals do not show which branch has the highest rate per service member.Th e data is also incomplete. A Department of Defense Inspector General review found the Army failed to report 41% of sampled criminal convictions to the FBI in 2015-2016, compared with 29% for the Navy and Marine Corps and 14% for the Air Force. Those are conviction-reporting gaps, not arrest totals, but they make simple branch-to-branch comparisons unreliable.
September 1, 2026