The problem is when the decision makers are removed from daily events, and they stick dogmatically to the plan and try to change reality to fit said plan.

A non-soviet example may well be McNamara's time as Secretary of Defense.

As one anecdote put it, by the time the report of a shooting of a elderly lady with a bicycle in a Vietnamese village had reached the DoD, it had become a ageless, genderless, combatant, with a grenade...