The Battle of Trenton was pretty impressive. I think its pretty clear that he improved substantially over his military career, and that he was better on the strategic rather than tactical level, especially as he matured as a strategist...
Okay, to be fair, the man who accepted the surrender at Yorktown was in many ways a better and more 'grown' man than the man who got his command humiliated during the French and Indian War twenty years earlier.
As to Trenton- well, frankly, a big part of the success was in knowing to attack the enemy at a time when they were utterly unprepared to defend themselves, in a place that was utterly unprepared for defense. I'm not dismissing this, it is very much a part of generalship, as is strategy, as is holding together a defeated command.
The thing is... this conversation began with "what famous general is Mira like?" And honestly, Mira
IS good at fighting pitched battles in roughly symmetric conditions. She's been doing very well at that. She's got a much better track record at symmetric, conventional warfare than Washington ever did, while at the same time having far less experience of truly
irregular warfare, at least in her time as president of Virmire.
To me the big interesting butterfly here is that by the end of the war we would be a multi-species polity under a unified government structure that has more military and economic power than the average Citadel associate race (assuming things go well). I don't recall ME having anything besides "unified single-species government" and "lawless anarchy," though I could be mistaken. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how the Council deals with the situation.
I kind of wish we had signed the declaration of independence. If it were a done deal the Council would probably overlook it for now given the pressing Rachni threat and it would frame the starting point for post-war negotiations. If we do it now it would be a lot more provocative.
There is literally no reason we can't sign a declaration of independence if we want to. I'd be flabbergasted if Poptart doesn't give us a chance to arrange exactly that.
I for one am cautiously in favor of it, though I'd like us to seriously consider joining the Citadel if we can parlay our status into associate membership. I suspect the next two thousand years will go a lot better with us on the inside looking out than on the outside looking in.