i also might have been very intentional about not really mentioning jake's personality in my post.
to bring my thoughts to cruel reality: i don't find that saving-the-world leaders need a terribly large amount of personality. they need a moral compass and a sense of priority and the end goal but, for the duration of the war, everything else needs to be set on a back burner or it gets in the way of winning with minimum casualties. the animorphs won because jake had no personality. he set the casual banter, the shenanigans with marco, the shopping with his cousin, developing a relationship with cassie, etc. aside.
the first parallel i come up with is ender wiggin. like a paper doll cut from the same outline, he's got a lot in common with jake; the only major difference in perception from the audience's view is derived from our seeing ender's early childhood. once ender got down to business, however, it was all about winning.
i'd be intrigued to read a book with a war-hero-commander-type protagonist that doesn't seem to lack in the 'personality' department. ...and maybe that's the issue. if we want personality, perhaps stories should be told of the commander post-war operations. cite osc spending five+ books on ender post-'ender's game'.
then there's the anti-hero commander (or the bad-at-his-job commander)... i haven't seen that trope make it to the main character list, yet. usually, such a commander is a supporting character or an antagonist.
anyway. vomity thoughts for a monday morning.
edit: GoT. i need to re-read those. GRRM is an exception, in that he has so many blasted characters that none of them need to be fully protagonists or antagonists... and so while he runs the gamut with commander-type tropes, none of them are really 'main protagonists'. or so i'm remembering, and i might be remembering incorrectly.