This paper mainly studied the problem of energy conserving in wireless sensor networks for target tracking in defensing combats. Firstly, the structures of wireless sensor nodes and networks were illustrated; Secondly, the analysis of existing energy consuming in the sensing layer and its calculation method were provided to build the energy conserving objective function; What's more, the other two indicators in target tracking, including target detection probability and tracking accuracy, were combined to be regarded as the constraints of the energy conserving objective function. Fourthly, the three energy conserving approaches, containing optimizing the management scheme, prolonging the time interval between two adjacent observations, and transmitting the observations selectively, were introduced; In addition, the improved lion algorithm combined with the Logistic chaos sequence was proposed to obtain sensor management schemes. Finally, simulations had been made to prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods and algorithm.