The radar signature calculations play an essential role in the design and functioning of today’s radars in detecting the surface and air targets.  Radar interrogation is essentially a transient electromagnetic scattering process and direct transient analysis provides an opportunity to observe and to interpret scattering behavior.  We present in this paper a comparison of two popular time domain numerical techniques widely used for direct transient analysis, namely, the transmission line matrix (TLM) method and the time-domain integral equation (TDIE) method. Both the methods belong to the category of time domain techniques; however, their modeling philosophy is quite different. Whereas the TLM method is based on the implementation of the Huygens principle by modeling the space with a system of interconnected transmission-lines, the TDIE is based on well known method of moments. The comparison is made via standard canonical shaped dielectric bodies, namely, a cube, and a sphere, mainly to address the factors affecting accuracy, efficiency, and the required computer resources.