How can the military or government employ the wisdom of crowds?
securenation.org
securenation.org
In fact, I would go so far as to say wisdom typically is contrary to group think.
When IXO folded I was pretty far along in marketing to them. I got strong advice to keep a low profile after that due to superficial similarities.
I think we probably have something to talk about if you have time for lunch. Email is on my profile.
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.
You're really eager to get new weapons into the hands of the Masters?
But yes government, with it's monopoly on force and tendency towards regulation is fundamentally antithetical to the crowd. Government can achieve certain efficiencies through uniformity but mandates don't really foster innovation.
To more thoroughly answer the OP, government can work with the crowd to 'promote the general welfare' by limiting itself. Ideally, the more remote levels of government should tolerate the experimentation and even the failings of the more local levels. By "tolerate" I mean less regulation but also withholding subsidies and bailouts. As Jefferson said,
"The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits."
The reason for this is twofold.
1) Government cannot create an incentive/bailout/subsidy without diminishing other, more successful pursuits through a taking.
2) By propping up self-destructive behavior, government enables it to perpetuate.
The experimentation of the more local levels of government and ultimately the individual citizens that compose self-government _is_ the exercise of the crowds. E.g., think of the unsolicited advancements the Wright brothers brought to the military.