Henry S. Griffis, Ph.D.

Henry S. Griffis, Ph.D. serves as team leader of the Defense Workforce Analysis team in CNA’s Resource Analysis division. He also serves as CNA’s scientific analyst to one of the U.S. Navy’s three-star admirals—to the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Manpower, Personnel, Training and Education (N1). Griffis is a labor economist and senior manpower policy analyst with more than 20 years of work experience in defense manpower and related issues. The team that he directs undertakes projects in the areas of recruiting, selection and classification, compensation, working conditions, diversity, attrition, reenlistment behavior, manpower requirements, reserves, training, and education. More than half of his team’s work has been for Navy Manpower, Personnel, Training and Education. In addition, his team has supported many sponsors in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). In the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (OUSD P&R), he has primarily supported Defense Language and National Security Education Office (DLNSEO), Military Personnel Policy (MPP), and Reserve Affairs (RA). In OUSD AT&L, he has primarily supported Human Capital Initiatives (HCI) and International Cooperation (IC).

In his own research, Griffis has studied the recruiting, retention, and readiness implications of a variety of proposed and existing policies. He has analyzed the retention impact on sailors of spending more time at sea and the compensation necessary to offset these retention effects. He has analyzed the cost-effectiveness of using different types of compensation to generate higher retention and/or additional recruiting success, including analyzing the tradeoffs between recruiting and retention as different ways to achieve the same endstrength. He has studied trends in the quantity and quality of retention during periods of military drawdown. In analysis for the Tenth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation (QRMC), he studied the military workforce implications of recruiting and retaining servicemembers from the “millennial” generation. In a study for IC, he assessed international acquisition training needs within the defense acquisition workforce. He recently participated in a study for DLNSEO evaluating the military’s Foreign Language Proficiency Bonus.

Griffis received a B.A. in economics from Pomona College in 1981 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1991. He joined CNA in 1989.