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Hi, and welcome to another episode of Software, Radio. I am your host, Rad. And I have a very special guest today, Ben Williams, former Navy officer in the Surface Warfare Department of the Navy. We'll talk about that.

Today, he's also the Chief Operating Officer for Exant Technology, which really dabbles probably with autonomous drones and AI. And that's a very hot topic right now. And we're going to crack this can open. And for the next hour, you're going to hear us talk about everything from, you know, what took him into the Navy to why autonomous AI today. So welcome to the show, Ben.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Yeah, wonderful to have you. And so Surface Warfare, can you tell me and my listener what exactly that is because I know boats right on the surface.

Yeah, so the way to think about it within the Navy, you generally have the folks that drive the boats or fight the boats. You have the folks that ride on the boats, which is, you know, Marine Corps, where the taxi drivers.

And then you have the aviators who fly helicopters and jets and all that sort of thing. So the Surface Warfare officers generally are the ones who are running the divisions on board the ship and each of you stand watch stations for driving or fighting the ship running engineering department sets or thing.

And then over time, that unrestricted line leads towards command of a ship. So if you stay in long enough, that's how you get to be the commanding officer of a ship or squadron.

So if I broke this down like Star Trek and we got in Kirk on the bridge and Kirk's got to go to somewhere else and then he puts, you know, Leonard Nimoy, you know, Spock in charge and the Spock's got to go with them though. Right.

So if you got the guy on the con, he's like an answer. He's like now in charge. Have you been the guy in charge of the ship?

In a sense, yes. So the watch station that is in charge of driving the ship at any one time is called the officer of the deck.

Yes. The person sort of runs the bridge and is charged with navigation and positioning to fight, etc. So yep, that's one of the one of the watch stations you have to qualify for on your first tour as a Surface Warfare officer.

How awesome is that? That's really cool for the intense. Yeah, that is intense. Now does Surface Warfare, just me being me, I think of like the thing called a sea wiz and I'm only thinking that's probably like on a lot of ships, right?

Because it's anti are you in charge of the sea wiz is like a gun, a gatling gun of sorts that just like it just fires me up.

Yeah, it's some absurd like 2000 rounds a second. It's like a minute. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's so correct. It's someone who knows who runs a sea wiz, correct us in comments. Yeah, I tell us. I know you're out. Yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty wild to see those things go because it's there. They're rapid articulations. So it like tracks incoming missiles in the story or last line of defense after you know the Jets can't shoot it down or your missile defense systems can't shoot down.

It's like the last one. So last 500 yards or something. That is crazy. It's an intense device on top on the ship. Now what kind of ships. Did you maneuver on?

So I was primarily my first tour was on board a cruiser, Bunker Hill, which was the first of the vertical launch cruisers in the US Navy.

And then I ran some small boat teams as part of a VBSS detachment that went up in sort of the northern Persian Gulf. And inside the the car of the law, waterways served right around the invasion of Iraq.

Second, second time. So VBSS means vehicle board search and seizure, right? So you were tasked with like attacking boats and searching, right?

Yeah, yeah, visit board search and seizure. So it was most of it was boarding commercial vessels that were suspected of smuggling or that sort of thing.

So, you know, you would in the typically understated Navy way, the ones where they shoot at you are called non-compliant.

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