How can the military or government employ the wisdom of crowds?

I'm pretty sure you need to prove the wisdom of the crowds first. Popular opinion != wisdom.<p>In fact, I would go so far as to say wisdom typically is contrary to group think.

America's Army comes to mind: They could learn strategies from players by creating scenarios and levels that exist in real life and see if any highly skilled players develop better strategies than they have had the time to develop.

I worked on a DARPA project to do exactly this called the Policy Analysis Market. Ask me how well that turned out ;)

Not exactly the same thing, but several tools in the Government rely on "crowd-sourcing" entity extraction and disambiguation vs. using an automated approach -- Axis Pro, Palantir, etc.<p>You get high quality named entity tagging (since humans are doing it), but it takes a lot longer than doing it by machine, and it has a couple of downsides -- like scaling poorly, involving lots of staff doing entity tagging instead of real work, a noticeable delay between incoming reports and being able to use them (since they aren't tagged and those systems pretty much require tagged documents to do anything useful with them), as well as people fighting over the disambiguation of certain entities.

Those particular authoritative institutions are usually trying to control the oh-so-wise crowd. In other words, you're asking how the authorities can use the communications of the crowd against the crowd.<p>You're really eager to get new weapons into the hands of the Masters?

How many people makes an Einstein? a Gauss? we can calculate the population at that time, or better the total pupulation until that moment...

Create an electronic/internet based voting system? Let the crowds vote on issues and bypass congress/lobbying/corruption :) If only....