Are you sure? His wookiepedia article says multiple times that Ozzel was something of a moron or inept as a military officer.
Applied by
our definitions of military education, planning, and hierarchy, no, Ozzel isn't incompetent--or if he is, that particular act ("I want proof, not leads.") does not make him incompetent. It makes him
conservative or even
overly cautious, but not incompetent. The whole "coming out of hyperspace too close to the system" is a good bit more complicated than "speculation in the face of inconclusive evidence"--in the first case, he and Piett had a completely normal disagreement over a finding, and then the little voice in the head of the ex-monastical maniac in an armored suit told
him which one of them was right. In the second case, Ozzel, as a battlegroup commander (apparently, in any case he was the commanding officer aboard the
Executor and all the other ships coordinated their movements in turn?) made a "sloppy" exit out of hyerspace which
did alert the enemy.
That's a bad thing. It has a strongest case of the charge incompetence. An alerted enemy became more capable of digging in for a siege, deploying their own active defense, and preparing for the invasion. But I haven't personally heard a good explanation as to
why he was "too close". What was he
supposed to do? What is "further out"? Exit hyperspace behind another planet in the Hoth system? I'm not sure exactly
how the Rebels don't detect a gigantic fleet--Ozzel's maneuver, on the other hand, at least seems justifiable in the sense that the closer the fleet emerged to Hoth, the fastest troops can be deployed (we understand at least
that much about how the invasion of Hoth worked). The Rebels had an surface-to-orbit cannon that
probably would've worked better the further the enemy fleet was (in the sense that they could target more of it at any given time), though it's not immediately clear if the Empire expected that.
It's...doesn't hold up to scrutiny very well, or at least, without further explanaion. We're taking Vader's word for it and, as explained to me in the past, it's worth noting that Vader is not particularly competent a military leader in the standpoint of maintaining his own command, potentially by choice. You don't kill flag officers for (let's assume) a mistake that endangered friendly troops (as if Vader actually
cared...more on that in a second), you demote or sack them
maybe. You
certainly don't kill a flag officer who
didn't make a mistake, but was simply confronted by an unanticipated maneuver, then proceeded to personally apologize for it (in other words, Needa). That's
completely wasteful. But the thing is, this could all be deliberate: if we assume Vader hates the Empire for making him what he is (well, the
Emperor more so, the
Empire mostly just made him an incredibly powerful potentate), and he's acting out in response, then his behavior isn't surprising.
Of course, all of this exists against the background formula of the franchise: big evil versus small good. There are
always more officers to replace the ones Vader kills on a tantrum (though considering a star destroyer had 36,000 crew by itself, the
Executor considerably more, and we saw Vader kill
two naval officers...that's not exactly the Moscow Show Trials), because there are always
more bad guys. The rebels are always scrappy and outnumbered. Ozzel and Needa are immediately disposable, both in the mind of Vader (the worse person to make supreme commander of the military), and the plot itself. Personally, I find that a little less compelling (imagine if, for example, Vader just killed Governor Tarkin the first time they disagreed...ANH would be worse for it, frankly), but perhaps it just amounts to window dressing anyway. I've tried in my own efforts to write compelling villains (though in their context, "antagonist" would be much more appropriate) because I like the idea of the story's heroes to be challenged by characters with the sort of "dimensional weight" (if that makes sense) they have, at least temporarily, who have as convincing motivations and similarly believable plans of action (instead of "If I make a mistake, my boss kills me."). Vader almost telepathically crushed the larynx of someone who disagreed with him at a war council meeting--either over his current failures (which they
were failures, as
Rogue One makes abundantly clear via retcon), or his extinct religion (which, by the way, the Emperor
himself purged out of existence, and the repudiation of which was orthodox). Tarkin listens to at least one member in that same council disagree and criticize his confidence and...tells him he's wrong, and that's it. He doesn't have him killed or choked. He doesn't care, or if he does care, he doesn't feel the need to resort to personal violence. So
that's different at least.
(But even I break from that too occasionally--as Night above me would know, re: "Walther Farkill". You can't do much with a name like that!)
