Photo By Edvin Hernandez | : Suanne Carnaghi, Director of Security and Command Security Manager, Strategic...... read more read more
Meet Suanne Carnaghi, the command security manager for Strategic Systems Programs.
Carnaghi comes from a family deeply rooted in military service. Her father, aunts, and siblings all served across the Department of Defense and now, her children do too.
“Between my aunts and my father, they have almost 100 years of combined service,” she said. “My daughter is in the Navy, my son is in the Coast Guard, and I have nephews who are in the Air Force. We are a proud military family.”
For Carnaghi, ensuring the safety of the warfighter couldn’t be more important and she proudly carries that sense of responsibility in her day-to-day work.
“Working here, at SSP, is so important to me because of our strategic deterrence mission and the things we do to protect the warfighter,” she said. “My job is centered on making sure security requirements are met at headquarters and at our sites across the country. So, as a team, we are focused on making sure we are protecting our information and protecting the men and women on the frontlines. Security is personal to me as my two children are currently serving in our military. In assuring security requirements are met with minimal risk to the program, it assures me I am doing all I can to keep them safe.”
Carnaghi began her federal career as a security officer with Naval Systems Management Activity (NSMA) in Washington D.C. in 1988. While there, she accrued valuable experience in managing sensitive material and ensuring compliance with Navy security regulations and standards. After 15 years at NSMA, she decided it was time to take a break and focus on her family.
During her hiatus however, Carnaghi began supporting a contracting company as a facility security officer.
“That’s where I learned industrial security and policy,” she said. “We were supporting Naval Sea Systems Command and one of the requirements we needed to fulfill was clearing the contracting company’s facility to continue supporting our government partners. This experience exposed me to industrial security policy and expanded my knowledge on the existing DoD [Department of Defense] and DoN [Department of Navy] security policies.”
In 2015, Carnaghi applied to SSP after hearing about a job opening from a former NSMA co-worker. She was selected to support as an industrial security specialist and onboarded the command at headquarters in Washington, D.C. Since then, Carnaghi has visited all SSP field activities and Program Management Offices (PMO) to understand how the command’s industrial partners support the SSP mission. She also reviewed SSP’s industrial security instruction among other security policies to develop a dedicated industrial security program for the command. This included collaborating with facility security officers and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency to ensure industrial security requirements were met.
“Industrial security is heavily involved with contractors, so I participated in their inspections and oversight reviews,” she said. “I served as the liaison and reported any problems or questions to our technical branches. This helped me learn the organization very quickly and supported our ability to build the industrial security program from the bottom up.”
Apart from developing SSP’s industrial security program, Carnaghi also supported the reshaping of security classification specifications, including providing direction on how the command’s industry partners should protect sensitive information.
“When I started reviewing the statements of work, I contacted our branch heads to understand how our industry partners were directly supporting their technical work,” she said. “I then started traveling and gaining first-hand exposure to what they [industry partners] were doing and understanding what was required in the statement of work. This was an important function to ensure DD-254s and security requirements were levied correctly.”
Her thorough review of the forms and security specifications provided SSP with countless cost-savings, identifying services that were no longer needed. Carnaghi fostered critical working relationships between SSP’s technical branches, contracting officer representatives, security teams, and the command’s contracting partners, supporting better transparency for information that was needed to complete projects and tightening the release of information through the DD-254 security requirements.
In 2022, Carnaghi was appointed as the command security manager – her current position – and now oversees classified information and the integrity of the command’s operations. This includes, but is not limited to classification and marking, access control, security education, and more. Today, she supports the workforce in exercising caution when handling and safeguarding sensitive information, ensuring the warfighter’s safety and the SSP mission is never compromised.
“My day-to-day is all about protecting the program – from information to people and to our infrastructure,” she said. “These matters touch national security, so it’s imperative to safeguard them properly and enable our mission success.”
Carnaghi said her favorite thing about working for SSP is the people and praised the command’s commitment to strategic deterrence.
“This place is family,” she said. “Our workforce has expanded exponentially over the past 10 years. Not just for headquarters, but our other programs too like Conventional Prompt Strike. I’m proud to be plank owner of CPS. Overall, I feel everyone working at SSP cares about the mission – they all inherently want to protect the program.”
SSP is the Navy command responsible for sustaining the Navy’s Strategic Weapon System (SWS) on the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBN) and supporting the integration of the D5LE weapon system on the new Columbia-class SSBNs. Looking to the future, SSP is actively modernizing the sea-based leg of the nuclear triad through development of the D5LE2 SWS and pioneering regional strike capabilities of the future through development of the nuclear-armed sea launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) and the non-nuclear hypersonic conventional prompt strike system (CPS).
| Date Taken: | 09.09.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 09.09.2025 15:22 |
| Story ID: | 547687 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 77 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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