Objective To validate the dimensions and items of safety culture of PLA navy by surveying the sailors and officers of a naval destroyer force using questionnaire, so as to provide evidence for designing and validating a safety culture scale for Chinese naval destroyer forces. Methods An initial safety culture scale was designed using 38 items of 6 dimensions based on previous literature. And a refined scale, which included 28 items of 5 dimnesions, was set up through pre-investigation and pre-analysis. The refined scale was then used to survey all the 421 military members of a naval destroyer force of Chinese PLA. A total of 396 (94.06%) validated questionnaires were recollected for analysis. Results It was found that 69 (17.42%) responders had experienced safety accidents, and 30.43% (21/69) of them were injured in the accidents. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to validate the five dimensions in the scale:satisfaction with safety, management commitment, supportive environment, priority of safety and work pressure, with the total variance explained being 67.62% and the Cronbach's α calculated for each dimension being all over 0.8, indicating a good internal consistency. The dimension scores showed that management commitment to safety was insufficient and the priority of safety was low. Conclusion The safety culture has great room for improvement in the naval destroyer force. Insufficient management commitment to safety impedes the education of safety, and the low priority of safety demands more emphasis on safety issues in the destroyer force. Although most dimensions of the scale have been confirmed, lack of communication dimension indicates pertinent dimensions should be designed with specific items for eastern nations.