From a WSJ story of a few days back:
A branch of the Pentagon is looking into whether a bunch of volunteers could design a better amphibious vehicle for the Marines than a defense contractor.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, is preparing to assess whether crowdsourcing, a freewheeling collaborative method sometimes used to develop software, can be an effective means of designing military equipment.
The U.S. military hopes crowdsourcing could help counter the enormous costs and long delays that often dog the development of new weaponry and vehicles.
Darpa aims to use crowdsourcing to tap more brainpower than the traditional defense-contractor route . . .
That dovetails with the positive response that Wikistrat has recently received from the Defense Department. Facing an era of wanting to do as much or more with far fewer resources, DoD is proving to be very receptive to the Wikistrat pitch. It's all about not relying on the same small crowd of contractors and working to get up to globalization speed, because that's the velocity at which all our enemies act and events unfold.