The Empire was Better than the Rebellion

To begin with, the war has the characteristics of an insurgency-war similar to how the US faced an insurgency in Vietnam. The US obviously was superior in nearly all respects, in everything from intelligence to better armament, and yet any sensible person who's studied the war would come to the conclusion that as far as the expectations were for the US, US clearly lost the war because it didn't meet the basic criteria of accomplishments that were reasonably expected of it. The meager Vietnamese army used the benefits they had, such as the knowledge of terrains and tactical maneuvers developed by people who knew said terrain, to drive up the death toll of the Americans and incur damages that were unsustainable, to the point where they broke it even with US going home with their heads down in crushing defeat. We clearly apply different standards when judging the Vietnamese war effort compared to the US because of the different starting points they were coming from. The Vietnamese suffered catastrophic casualties and there's no comparison as far as that goes. But that is not the standard with which we judge the conflict but how well each respective party accomplished the goals they set out. From this outlook, US clearly lost. The same comparison goes when comparing the rebel alliance with the Galactic army. They started out with two death stars and AT-ATs and other coolf stuff, and certainly seeing from that metric then the empire wins. There are however many more major fails of the imperial army that really puts it splendor into question. While the Rebels are ably to carry off complex and coordinated joint missions with the fighter squadrons, the fleet, Special Operation Forces - even with obi Wan and the indigenous Ewoks. The empire's blunders in recovering the stolen Death Star plans with the rather bumbling policy of the squad leader to "If the door is locked, move on to the next one" that didn't really bore out any results, and their seemingly ineptness in coordinating operations between different unions, such as when the two Star Destroyers in chasing Han Solo nearly smash into one another. Another such example would be the defense of the shield of the forest moon of Endor which was before anything else just a major fail and so poorly defended that you start to wonder whether they learned anything from the slip-up of the first death star. The back-door to the shield defense was so lightly guarded that all you needed was a jihadi/suicidal rebel and you could have destroyed before the other haplessly deployed stormtroopers could do anything. Luckily for them the rebels don't have time to do any real damage before they come to save it in time, but that is still a huge oversight that could have costed them dearly. The make-shift deployment ends up being their own undoing. Han Solo takes control of a AT-ST and manages to get in without any follow-up question or any safety protocols or anything from the guys in the chain-of-command. Perhaps that's because the system itself is very top-down and no one dares to give the emperor any bad news and so they just go along because they don't dare to question the emperor's personal legion. When the punishment for not reaching perfection is you being taken out by a choke-hold, it fosters a tendency among subordinates to lie to you. Perhaps that's why they can't manage to find the droids they're looking for or let the Star Destroyer be taken down by a single fighter. You could say the heavy cost of failure if a very flawed incentive-structure that invites failure. After Admiral Ozzel learned of the location of the Hoth base, he seemed to take a long time, maybe weeks, to summon a military presence there and gain complete reconnaissance of the place. We can surmise this from the fact that the laceration on Luke's face from the encounter with the snow creature are healed by the time of the battle. To drop the droid too close to the planet obviously gave them off and therefore they lost the element of surprise. Furthermore, th rebels managed to set up the defense shield to avoid any bombardments. While the death of Ozzel might have been "warranted" the general might not even have been briefed on the situation before Ozzel died and the battle had commenced. There were no real back-up in the airspace and so the imperial army lost a lot of edge by deploying the AT-ATs to quickly. Also, they way the rebels managed to escape from there was jsut embarrising to say the least. No, there are jsut to many slip-ups for me to really say they're "better".