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Home front is the term commonly used to describe the civilian populace of the nation at war as an active support system of the fighting effort. Traditionally, civilian populations were considered to be separate from the war-fighting activities of a nation, and as such to be protected from attack. However, in a modern industrial nation's armed forced the "tail" of support services which enable the "teeth" of combat soldiers to fight must necessarily be understood to extend all the way to the factories that build the materiel.
This continuity of military effort from fighting soldier to manufacturing facility has profound effects for theories and practice of total war. If the factories and workers producing war materiel are part of the war effort, they thus become legitimate targets for attack, rather than protected noncombatants.
The importance of civilian manufacturing and support services in a nation's capacity to fight a war first became apparent during the twenty five years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars when the United Kingdom was able to finance, and to a lesser extent arm and supply the various coalitions which opposed France. Although Britain had a much smaller population than France, its global maritime trade and its early industrialisation meant that its economy was much larger than that of France which allowed Britain to offset the French man power advantage.
In the American Civil War, the capacity of Northern factories proved as decisive in winning the war as the skills of either side's generals. During World War I the British Shell Crisis of 1915 and the appointment of Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions was a recognition that the whole economy would have to be geared for war if the Allies were to prevail on the Western Front.
It was not until World War II that the term "home front" actually entered the English language. It derives from a speech by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which he stated that the efforts of civilians at home to support the war through personal sacrifice was as critical to winning the war as the efforts of the soldiers themselves, and that the civilian populace constituted an additional front at home.
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