Dear Dr. Herbert: Thank you for engaging this vitally important topic again. I fall into your 2nd reaction group: Disappointed. Why did the Naval Academy cave? Why didn’t Naval officers physically restrain the people operating on “Pete Hegseth’s breathtakingly stupid” order? And if the answer to that question is that Hegseth’s order was legal, was it not also unconstitutional? And if our Democracy is already in a state of collapse, then, at what point in time, does it become the moral and legal obligation of Naval officers to honor their oath to the Constitution as taking precedence over their obligation to follow an order from Pete Hegseth? Does the signal to revolt against the government need to come from a biased and bought-off Supreme Court, a Congress that is a partner in this collapse of Democracy, from the Speaker of the House, who is a sycophant of Trump, or the Department of Justice that is clearly a complicit partner? Or is there a structure within the Joint Chiefs, our intelligence community, or the Pentagon that can be trusted to honor our history and structure of government? Because if we get stuck in the mud of making sure everyone in a position to arrest this process was just too goddamned careful, we will look back on these days with great shame.