Home Front

Home front is the informal term for the civilian populace of the nation at war as an active support system of their military. Combat soldiers depend on "home front" civilian support services such as the factories that build materiel to support the "military front".

Civilian populations were traditionally uninvolved in combat, except when the fighting happened to reach their dwelling places. However, the expanded destructive capabilities of modern warfare posed an increased direct threat to civilian populations. With the rapid increase of military technology, the term "military effort" has changed to include the "home front" as a reflection of both a civilian "sector" capacity to produce arms, as well as the structural or policy changes which deal with its vulnerability to direct attack.

This continuity of "military effort" from fighting soldier to manufacturing facility has profound effects for the concept of "total war". By this logic, if factories and workers producing materiel are part of the war effort, they become legitimate targets for attack, rather than protected noncombatants. Hence, in practice, both sides in a conflict attack civilians, with the understanding that these are legitimate and lawful targets in war. This military view of civilian targets has effects on the equity of applied legal principles on which the prosecution of crimes against humanity are based.

The concept of civilians' involvement in war also developed in connection with general development and change of the ideological attitude to the state. In feudal society and also in absolute monarchy the state was perceived as essentially belonging to the monarch and the aristocracy, ruling over a mass of passive commoners; wars were perceived as a contest between rival rulers, conducted "above the head" of the commoners, who were expected to submit to the victor.

In contrast, since the French Revolution, the state was increasingly perceived as belonging to "the People", a perception shared—though in different forms—by democracy, communism and fascism. A logical conclusion was that war has become everybody's business and that also those not taken into the armed forces must still "do their part" and "fight on the home front".