In this paper, we have designed an SAR automatic target recognition (SAR ATR) algorithm using the convolutional neural network (CNN), which has excellent image recognition performance. Previous SAR ATR methods are difficult to implement, because they include additional preprocessing processes or need prior SAR image information. To address these issues, we propose a CNN structure that is specialized for SAR image classification by modifying the structure of VGGNet. It is confirmed by simulation that the classification accuracy of the proposed method on the MSTAR SAR dataset is increased by 1-2% compared with the conventional VGGNet. Moreover, the classification performance is further improved when the train data is much smaller than the test data. © ICROS 2017.