This paper investigates the reduction of backscatter radar cross section (RCS) for a rectangular cavity embedded in the ground plane. The bottom of the cavity is coated by a thin, multilayered radar absorbing material (RAM) with possibly different permittivities. The objective is to minimize the backscatter RCS by the incidence of a plane wave over a single or a set of incident angles. By formulating the scattering problem as a Helmholtz equation with artificial boundary condition, the gradient with respect to the material permittivities is determined efficiently by the adjoint state method, which is integrated into a nonlinear optimization scheme. Numerical example shows the RCS may be significantly reduced.