Military Chiefs Open Drive to Force Armed Services to Cooperate More : Pentagon: Increased pooling of weapons and other resources is the goal. Fierce turf battles among Army, Navy and Air Force are expected to result.

The nation’s top military leadership has begun a major new push to force the individual armed services to pool their equipment and resources more thoroughly, setting the stage for what could become one of the Pentagon’s fiercest turf battles in years.

Officials said that the effort, spearheaded by Adm. William A. Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could have important implications for the Pentagon budget, the structure and weapons of each of the services and even the way the military fights future wars.

The project already has spawned strong objections from the individual services. Insiders said that the Air Force, Army and Navy are strongly opposed to the effort, on grounds that it would deprive them of their traditional power to decide such issues on their own.

Senior military officers said that Owens, who assumed the vice chairman’s job in March after having earned a reputation as one of the Navy’s most reform-minded long-range planners, is likely to face an uphill battle.

“Anytime you get into this, you get into each service’s crown jewels,” a senior military officer involved in the effort declared.

Nevertheless, officials said, the project has the backing of Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who is convinced that the services must go further than they have so far to combine their resources in the face of declining defense budgets.

The new effort would force the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines to take account of what other branches of the armed forces can do in carrying out various missions, from intelligence gathering to gaining air superiority during the early phases of a campaign.

It also would require for the first time that the services plan their budgets cooperatively, ceding turf or eliminating weapons where top military leaders decide that another service can do a job better. Today, each service plans its own budget.

Owens already has gotten the project under way using a little-known committee known as the Joint Requirements and Oversight Council--a high-level panel comprising the vice chiefs of staff of each of the individual services, all of them four-star generals or admirals.

The group has begun a series of reviews aimed at identifying weaknesses, duplication and overlap in the various services’ modernization and procurement programs, with the aim of eliminating redundancies and filling vacuums.

In considering those issues, however, the group also is expected to thrash out potential changes in the roles and missions of each of the services and potential changes in military doctrine that may be necessary to carry out any reshuffling that it proposes.

Among the questions that the panel is pondering, for example, is whether the Air Force should take over Army programs for high-altitude air-defense and whether the Army’s multiple-launch rocket system should be adapted for use by Navy warships.

The panel also is expected to recommend adapting current precision-guided weapons, sensor systems and computer software so all four services can take advantage of common high-technology systems, such as satellite links and target-acquisition devices.

That, in turn, could require the services to give up some of the pet weapons projects that they now have on the books which were launched a decade or so ago when the services operated more as individual forces.

Officials said that Owens hopes to have an initial set of proposals this autumn, in time for the fiscal 1996 budget. But critics cautioned that the effort is so radical it is unlikely to yield many major changes for at least a year or more.

Robert W. Gaskin, a former Pentagon strategist now with Business Executives for National Security, a defense-monitoring group, said that Owens’ effort is long overdue.

The Owens project, outlined in a document labeled “Assessing Joint Warfighting Capabilities,” seeks to review military requirements for today’s post-Cold War missions, evaluate the readiness of existing forces and decide what new weapons systems will be needed.

It calls for high-level reviews in 10 separate areas, including intelligence, surveillance, command-and-control, strike capability, air superiority, strategic mobility, overseas presence, joint readiness, information warfare and counterproliferation.

To some outside observers, the effort appears to be intended partly to enable the military to preempt--if not usurp--a separate, civilian-run Commission on Roles and Missions set up by former Defense Secretary Les Aspin.

It also would provide the Joint Chiefs of Staff--and the vice chiefs of the individual services--with substantially more power than it has assumed in recent years. Until this year, for example, the Joint Requirements and Oversight Council was a low-profile advisory board that mainly rubber-stamped the services’ proposals.

The military has begun moving toward more and more joint operations in recent years, under which units from all four services are assigned to a single commander, who is empowered to order them into combat without going through each services’ chief of staff.

But the services still act independently in planning their weapons purchases, budgets and individual doctrine.