WASHINGTON -- Military planners in the 21st century will get a big boost from the radar mapping data collected by Space Shuttle Endeavour's crew, military experts say.

Instead of using paper maps and grainy black and white spy satellite photos to plot their operations, military commanders in the future will be able to use information from digital radar maps to create a computerized 3-D picture of the battlefield. That picture will tell them not only the location, but also the precise height of every tree, hill or mountaintop, and the depth of every ditch, valley or canyon.

With that much detail, jet fighter and bomber pilots could safely evade enemy radar on the way to their targets, and ground troops could get a more accurate picture of what's ahead of them. Pentagon cartographers would be able to draw up pinpoint maps that could cut down on so-called "collateral damage" to civilian areas.

"Smart weapons need smart maps, and right now the military does not have smart maps," says John Pike, space policy chief at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. "This will give them a worldwide smart map. It's going to provide worldwide digital elevation data and they need that, because when you target a smart weapon, you need to know the vertical dimensions of your target.

Elevation data, Pike says, is "the missing ingredient" in the Pentagon's current war-planning capabilities.

During the Cold War, it wasn't necessary for U.S. military planners to have such detailed maps. After all, the positions of key Soviet military bases and ports were well known -- and well photographed by spy satellites orbiting high overhead. NATO forces were positioned accordingly throughout Western Europe to blunt any possible attack from the former Soviet Union or its allies.

But now with the Cold War over and the Soviet Union dissolved, the Pentagon increasingly is moving to an all-smart weapons armory that could be moved anywhere around the world. Instead of concentrating on a single potential foe, U.S. military chiefs today must be prepared for attacks from any of a dozen or so rogue nations trying to beef up their own arsenals.

"Ten years ago you knew who the bad guys were, but in the new world I suspect there's an impetus in the military to be better prepared map-wise," says Michael Kobrick, a project scientist for the shuttle mapping mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"The days when soldiers would go out in the field with paper maps and film are gone," Pike says. "Everything now uses some sort of digital mission planning software that needs an accurate 3-D map. Now when soldiers go out, they need to see what the neighborhood looks like or what's beyond the next mountain. You just drape a two-dimensional model from a spy satellite over a three-dimensional digital radar map and the squad leader can know where the next hill or valley is, or what's behind that tree."

About the only weapon that won't benefit much from radar mapping data is the ground-hugging cruise missile, Pike says. Mission planners already use data from highly accurate Global Positioning System satellites to guide cruise missiles to their targets.

Overall, the radar mapping data is an advantage that could prove decisive in actual combat.

"Anything where you want to take some form of action, or you want to drop something or you need to assess a battle in a foreign country, you need to know the geography," says Jeffrey Richelson, a Washington author and expert on military intelligence. "It's providing more data and that could make a big difference."