The purpose of the Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) Center is to develop an environment conducive to producing theoretical and practical advances in the field of ATR. This will be accomplished by fostering intellectual growth of ATR practitioners at all levels. From an initial focus on students and performance modeling, the Center's efforts are extending to professionals in government, academia, and industry. The ATR Center will advance the state of the art in ATR through collaboration between these researchers. To monitor how well the Center is achieving its goals, several tangible products have been identified: graduate student research, publicly available data and associated challenge problems, a wiki to capture the body of knowledge associated with ATR, development of stronger relationships with the users of ATR technology, development of a curriculum for ATR system development, and maintenance of documents that describe the state-of-the-art in ATR. This presentation and accompanying paper develop the motivation for the ATR Center, provide detail on the Center's products, describe the Center's business model, and highlight several new data sets and challenge problems. The "persistent and layered sensing" context and other technical themes in which this research is couched are also presented. Finally, and most importantly, we will discuss how industry, academia, and government can participate in this alliance and invite comments on the plans for the third phase of the Center.