Abstract: The online identification for tactical maneuver of target can provide important information for air combat situation sensing, mission planning and aid decision making. Since the radar data cannot provide the posture information, it is difficult to describe the tactical maneuver of the enemy vehicle. In this paper, a two-stage recognition system for tactical maneuver of target based on air combat maneuver element (ACME) was proposed. First, the information from airborne radar was analyzed. Then, tactical maneuver was decomposed into eleven ACMEs according to the trajectory analyzing, thus simplifying the maneuver representation. And then, a recognition method utilizing random forest and support vector machine was designed, in the first stage, recognizing ACMEs with trajectory parameters, in the second stage, identifying tactical maneuver based on ACMEs sequence and motion parameters. Finally, the simulation results show that typical maneuver can be represented effectively by ACMEs and identified correctly by the recognition method.