A private Facebook group of former and serving Defence Force members has provided a disturbing insight into the sexist and racist culture that exists inside the ranks.

ABC1's 7.30 has been given access to the site by a concerned member, and its content suggests the top brass has a long way to go before it cleans up the ADF's culture.

The Facebook group, which has more than 1,000 former and serving members of the Royal Australian Regiment, is extremely busy and acts as an online meeting place where racist, sexist and abusive views are shared.

The site refers to Muslims as "ragheads". It suggests immigrants are not welcome, and one post says "all women are filthy, lying whores".

When Defence Minister Stephen Smith announced last year that more women would go into combat, the Facebook group went into overdrive.

"Let's face it, the RAAF get the best-looking ones, the Navy get second dibs, and the Army as usual get what's left. Vote 1, Ugly chicks in every diggers gunpit!!" reads one post.

Hundreds of other crude, expletive-riddled comments are unpublishable.

Naomi Brookes spent a year at the Defence Force Academy before deciding it was not the place for her.

She says the site's content does not come as a surprise.

"No, I wasn't shocked at all, because I've heard it all before and it's pretty commonplace," she said.

For Ms Brookes, the trigger for leaving was the way a friend was treated by her peers after being raped.

"They would say things. One of the ones that really made me angry was about a week after it happened and someone in my div said she should just get over it already and calling her words that I don't like to repeat," she said.

Ms Brookes says when the Skype sex scandal was revealed last year, similar attacks took place on various social media sites.

"They would say things like 'oh, she's such a slut, she deserved it, she was asking for it', that sort of mentality where the blame is really placed on the woman and in no capacity did the comments engage with her not consenting to it," she said.

"Comments like the ones on the Facebook groups aren't all that unusual and because they're not all that unusual, as time goes on they seem less and less obscene.

"It feeds back into itself and throughout the year that I was there those sort of comments became more commonplace because it wasn't seen as unacceptable."

'Pretty gutless'

Laurel Papworth, a social media strategist who has advised defence forces overseas, says there is an element of a gentleman's club to the closed Facebook group.

"It's typical of a group of guys. Here they are not accountable... there's no-one to hold them to account for that," she said.

"It's actually pretty gutless of them because they would not be putting up those groups if their mum could see it and their sister and their wives and their boss and their maiden aunt.

"So they know they're not doing the right thing so they're joining the group so they can misbehave."

Ms Papworth says the behaviour online begs the question as to what kind of men the Australian military is turning out.

"I also think there's probably systemic ignoring of this kind of behaviour - guys will be guys, just ignore it as long as they get the job done," she said.

"I'm not sure that's an appropriate response to this kind of bad behaviour online."

Lieutenant-General David Morrison has been the Army chief for eight months, and in a speech on Tuesday night he spoke of preserving the Defence Force's strong combat culture.

"We must preserve this because it's vital to our success, but we also need to concede that our culture has tended to exclude women and some ethnic groups that are under-represented in our ranks," he said.

Decent purpose

Lieutenant-General Morrison is pushing ahead with efforts to bring more women and more minority groups into the services.

"Will it cancel out any unfortunate incidences in the future? Unlikely. Human nature is human nature, irrespective of whether it's lived in uniform or without," he said.

Defence hierarchy was alerted to the Facebook group and its contents eight months ago when a member of the group wrote to the Chief of Defence and the Department Secretary.

He also took his concerns to the Minister's office more than once.

But the online group does serve a decent purpose, conducting fundraising for serving soldiers.

And its administrators have warned members repeatedly to avoid overtly racist or sexist material.

But finding the right balance seems to be difficult.

Catharine Lumby, who advised the NRL when it first set out to overcome abusive attitudes towards women, says the ADF has only just started the process of cultural change.

"This shows that these problems are there, there are problems and they're going to have to commit to really long-term change," she said.

"And we shouldn't be caning them for that, we should be supporting them in that process," she said.

But Ms Brookes, who is now embarking on a new career after her experiences at the Defence Force, believes much more needs to be done to see any real change.

"It's come to the point where it needs external pressure from greater Australian society in order to make that change, because if Defence is left to deal with it again, I don't believe the necessary cultural shift will happen," she said.