Savior generals

It's not an adequate rebuttal to counterinsurgency doctrine but Col. Gian Gentile's polemic Wrong Turn has three very interesting memes relevant to our little world: "the bad general," "the better general," and "the savior general." His method of debunking these pop culture archetypes is to document the underlying and pervasive continuity (in policy and practice) between the "bad," the "better," and the "savior."

One wonders if the germ of this idea came from Civil War readings.

Update (3/29): A reader alerts us that Victor D. Hanson had a book out called The Savior Generals. Gentile quotes Hanson on other matters but does not attribute "savior generals".