NCTR(Non-Cooperative Target Recognition) and ATR(Automatic Target Recognition) are methodologies to identify military targets using radar, optical, and infrared images. Among them, a strategy to recognize ground targets using synthetic aperature radar(SAR) images is called SAR ATR. In general, SAR ATR consists of three sequential stages: detection, discrimination and classification. In this paper, a modification of the polar mapping classifier(PMC) to identify inverse SAR(ISAR) images has been made in order to apply it to SAR ATR. In addition, a preprocessing scheme can mitigate the effect from the clutter, and information on the shadow is employed to improve the classification accuracy.