A solution to the electromagnetic scattering of a transverse magnetic plane wave due to a perfectly conducting elliptic cylinder coated by a lossless, nonmagnetic, and elliptic multilayer dielectric is proposed. Despite the lack of orthogonality of the eigenfunctions of the field inside different layers, an efficient recursive procedure for the computation of the solution is devised. It is based on series expansions of the fields in terms of Mathieu functions and on a Galerkin approach. An outline of the procedure is given, and some numerical results, concerning both the field quantities and the radar cross section per unit length, are provided.¿ 1997 American Geophysical Union