As this latest installment of The Vanguard and the last one should imply, the ship Milect (Machine Intellect) or the ship, same thing, is the leader of this particular Vanguard team.

This arrangement is actually quite common on ships in the Vanguard universe in general, and ships of the Galactic Union and the Vanguard in particular. Since the Milects are highly advanced and powerful intellects, and have proven themselves over the millenia of the Union's existence to be dedicated to the safety, comfort and happiness of the biological intellects (or bionts for short) under their care, AND are better at providing that care than ANY biont government has EVER been, the bionts on most Union ships worlds and space habitats just let the Milects run things.

Yep, the Galactic Union is run by machines. Highly advanced, extremely intelligent and powerful machines of course. Sure, there are representative councils and whatnot on various worlds (although they're rather redundant since every GU citizen has a direct link to their local Milect by various means), but it's the Milects that make and implement the final decisions regarding such governmental duties as foriegn policy, resource allocation, and security of its citizens, subject to direct vote by each citizen.

This is of course, not my direct idea-my inspiration for it comes from Iain M. Bank's Culture novels. I liked the idea of a civilization run by highly intelligent, powerful, but benevolent AI-I figure they'd do a far better job of running that civilization than any human government ever has or will.