David Frum: Women in combat will push down military qualifications

Conservative columnist David Frum said Wednesday that it was a bad idea to allow women to fill combat roles in the U.S. military.

Frum, an editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, explained on CNN that he had three reasons why women shouldn't be in combat.

"The first is, as we have already seen with the expansion of the roles of women, steady downward pressure on military qualifications -- reductions in strength and endurance requirements in order to get numbers up," he said.

"The second is the risk of harm to female personnel," Frum continued. "The people we are likely to meet on the next battlefield are people who use rape and sexual abuse as actual tools of politics. In Iranian prisons, rape is a frequent practice. Women are raped before they are executed. In Iran, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan rape is a conscious tool of subjugation and it is something women will be exposed to. In the name of equal opportunity they will face unequal risk."

"And the third point, one I think we should give real thought to, is the stress on military families. We already lose a lot of officers at the major and colonel level because of the strained families. For those military spouses who are not in combat, who are not deployed, this is one more reason to worry about the high rate of family breakup we see among military personnel."

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta issued an order on Wednesday that overturned a 1994 rule barring women from combat roles in the military.

Watch video, courtesy of CNN, below: