Home guard is a title given to various military organizations at various times, with the implication of an emergency or reserve force raised for local defense.
The term "home guard" was first officially used in the American Civil War, starting with units formed by German immigrants in Missouri, and may derive from possible historical use of the term Heimwehr ("home guard") to describe units officially known as Landwehr ("country guard"), or from an attempted translation of landwehr.
| Country | Name | Active | |
|---|---|---|---|
 Canada | Canadian Rangers | 1942– | |
 Denmark | Danish Home Guard | 1949– | |
 |  Estonia | Estonian Defence League | 1918–1940, 1990– |
 |  Germany | Heimatschutz of Bundeswehr | 1965–2007, 2019– |
 |  India | Indian Home Guard | 1962– |
 |  Latvia | Latvian National Guard | 1991– |
 |  Lithuania | Lithuanian National Defence Volunteer Forces | 1991– |
 |  Norway | Norwegian Home Guard | 1946– |
 |  Poland | Polish Territorial Defense Force | 2017– |
 Sri Lanka | Sri Lankan Home Guard | 1986– | |
 |  Sweden | Swedish Home Guard | 1940– |
 |  Ukraine | Territorial Defense Forces | 2022– |
 |  United States | State defense forces of State governments and Territory governments | 1917– |
A militia is generally an army or some other fighting organization of non-professional or part-time soldiers; citizens of a country, or subjects of a state, who may perform military service during a time of need, as opposed to a professional force of regular, full-time military personnel; or, historically, to members of a warrior-nobility class. When acting independently, militias are generally unable to hold ground against regular forces; militias commonly support regular troops by skirmishing, holding fortifications, or conducting irregular warfare, instead of undertaking offensive campaigns by themselves. Local civilian laws often limit militias to serve only in their home region, and to serve only for a limited time; this further reduces their use in long military campaigns. Militias may also, however, serve as a pool of available manpower for regular forces to draw from, particularly in emergencies.
A paramilitary is a military that is not a part of a country's official or legitimate armed forces. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of the term "paramilitary" as far back as 1934.
National guard is the name used by a wide variety of current and historical uniformed organizations in different countries. The original National Guard was formed during the French Revolution around a cadre of defectors from the French Guards.
The Home Guard was an unpaid armed citizen militia supporting the 'Home Forces' of the British Army during the Second World War. Operational from 1940 to 1944, the Home Guard comprised more than 1.5 million local volunteers otherwise ineligible for military service, such as those who were too young or too old to join the regular armed services and those in reserved occupations. Excluding those already in the armed services, the civilian police or other civil defence volunteer organisations, approximately one in five men were Home Guard volunteers. Their primary role was to act as a secondary defence force in their home locality in case of invasion by the forces of Nazi Germany.
The Auxiliary Units, Home Guard Shock Squads or GHQ Auxiliary Units were specially trained, highly secret quasi military units created by the British government during the Second World War with the aim of using irregular warfare in response to a possible invasion of the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany. With the advantage of having witnessed the rapid fall of several Continental European nations, the United Kingdom was the only country during the war that was able to create a guerrilla force in anticipation of an invasion.
Irregular military is any non-standard military component that is distinct from a country's national armed forces. Being defined by exclusion, there is significant variance in what comes under the term. It can refer to the type of military organization, or to the type of tactics used. An irregular military organization is one which is not part of the regular army organization. Without standard military unit organization, various more general names are often used; such organizations may be called a troop, group, unit, column, band, or force. Irregulars are soldiers or warriors that are members of these organizations, or are members of special military units that employ irregular military tactics. This also applies to irregular infantry and irregular cavalry units.
Auxiliaries are support personnel that assist the military or police but are organised differently from regular forces. Auxiliary may be military volunteers undertaking support functions or performing certain duties such as garrison troops, usually on a part-time basis. Unlike a military reserve force, an auxiliary force does not necessarily have the same degree of training or ranking structure as regular soldiers, and it may or may not be integrated into a fighting force. Some auxiliaries, however, are militias composed of former active duty military personnel and actually have better training and combat experience than their regular counterparts.
The Croatian Home Guard was the land army part of the armed forces of the Independent State of Croatia which existed during World War II.
The Ulster Volunteers was an Irish unionist, loyalist paramilitary organisation founded in 1912 to block domestic self-government for Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom. The Ulster Volunteers were based in the northern province of Ulster. Many Ulster Protestants and Irish unionists feared being governed by a nationalist Catholic-majority parliament in Dublin and losing their links with Great Britain. In 1913, the militias were organised into the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and vowed to resist any attempts by the British Government to impose Home Rule on Ulster. Later that year, Irish nationalists formed a rival militia, the Irish Volunteers, to safeguard Home Rule. In April 1914, the UVF smuggled 25,000 rifles into Ulster from Imperial Germany. The Home Rule Crisis was interrupted by the First World War. Much of the UVF enlisted with the British Army's 36th (Ulster) Division and went to fight on the Western Front.
Malaya, then under British administration, was gradually occupied by Japanese forces between 8 December 1941 and the Allied surrender at Singapore on 15 February 1942. The Japanese remained in occupation until their surrender to the Allies in 1945. The first Japanese garrison in Malaya to lay down their arms was in Penang on 2 September 1945 aboard HMS Nelson.
A ranger is typically someone in a law enforcement or military/paramilitary role specializing in patrolling a given territory, called "ranging" or "scouting". The term most often refers to:
Malaysia's armed forces, which encompasses three major branches, originate from the formation of local military forces in the first half of the 20th century, during British colonial rule of Malaya and Singapore prior to Malaya's independence in 1957. The branches have undergone several restructuring, but fundamentally includes the army, navy and air force.
In the American Civil War the Home Guard or Home Guards were local militia raised from Union loyalists.
The Hilfspolizei was a short-lived auxiliary police force in Nazi Germany in 1933. The term was later semi-officially used for various auxiliary organizations subordinated to the Ordnungspolizei as well as various military and paramilitary units set up during World War II in German-occupied Europe.
In various theaters of operations in the Portuguese Colonial War arose at the outset the need to create various types of irregular forces to help the Portuguese Armed Forces.
A field force in British, Indian Army and Tanzanian military parlance is a combined arms land force operating under actual or assumed combat circumstances, usually for the length of a specific military campaign. It is used by other nations, but can have a different meaning.
The Anti-Communist Volunteer Militia were paramilitary auxiliary formations of the Royal Italian Army composed of Yugoslav anti-Partisan groups in the Italian-annexed and occupied portions of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia during the Second World War.
The Ustaše Militia was the military branch of the Ustaše, established by the fascist and genocidal regime of Ante Pavelić in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), an Axis puppet state established from a large part of occupied Yugoslavia during World War II.
The Vermont State Guard (VSG) is the all-volunteer state defense force of the state of Vermont. The Vermont State Guard serves parallel to the Vermont National Guard, acting as a reserve force for the State of Vermont Military Department. The Vermont State Guard is a reserve force composed of individuals living as civilians when not activated, but the force can be activated in the event of an attack or natural disaster to serve as a force multiplier for the National Guard, and is assigned to fulfill the state mission of the National Guard when the National Guard is deployed.
The New Hampshire State Guard (NHSG) is the currently unorganized state defense force of New Hampshire. The purpose of the State Guard is to augment or replace the New Hampshire National Guard by assuming the National Guard's stateside duties when any part of the National Guard is federalized. However, unlike the National Guard, the State Guard is a purely state-level military force which cannot be federalized or deployed outside the state of New Hampshire. The NHSG is a component of the organized militia of New Hampshire.
