Which is exactly my point. For the extreme homefront measures proposed to be actually popularly supported, the citizens have to generally believe they will be useful, and not just tools of the military to establish a military dictatorship.
So there has to be actual fighting, and actual soldiers going to the front, and actual deaths, and actual munitions industries supplying the soldiers on the front.
And for a small country that isn’t realistic. The war will either be over in a few weeks as the small country is overrun, or it’s a phony war with sniping and artillery barrages across the border, but not much is really happening.
These sorts of measures were imposed in WWI and WWII by the major powers, or minor powers who were firmly part of the Allies/Axis.
But note that in WWII not even Nazi Germany was as regimented as the OP proposes. People think dictatorship means absolute regimentation, and everyone obeys orders–or else. But in reality dictatorship means ad hoc rule. People in power do whatever they like. If you have connections all the supposed rules mean nothing, because nobody will dare to enforce them against you. So there may be all sorts of laws, but they are very haphazardly enforced, because you never know the consequences of trying to enforce the rules against a particular person. In other words, the cops don’t obey and enforce the law, they do whatever their boss tells them to do.
So the point is, how long is this war supposed to go on, and how long can the country hold together under such conditions? A small country is going to fall apart much more quickly than a large country because the small country runs out of resources and ability to fight and resupply much more quickly. So in a war between two small countries the war will be over, won or lost, before these measures can be imposed. A country with a strong enough civil society to enforce these measures won’t tolerate them, and an autocratic government might try but won’t be able to enforce them.
Shambolic low level wars can go on for years, but that’s because the central governments or rebels don’t have the strength to force an end to the war.
So if the government has the strength to impose a total war economy on the country, the war will be over quickly because that country will have a massive strength advantage over the enemy. But that means nothing if the small country is simply defeated outright in the first spasm of the war. Look at the difference between WWI and WWII. Germany attacks France in both, and in WWI they nearly manage to knock out France in the initial offensive, in WWII they succeed.
So the point is, if the survival of the country is at stake such that these homefront measures will help the threat from the enemy has to be precisely calibrated. If the enemy is too weak then the measures are pointless unless the real goal is military dictatorship. If the enemy is too strong then the country collapses before the homefront measures do any good. The war has to be over stakes of national survival, not a phony war border dispute, but it has to drag on and on. Small countries don’t really have large munitions industries or vast resource extraction supply chains, and can’t sustain a high intensity war, no matter how much the homefront sacrifices. And for a low intensity war the homefront won’t tolerate this sort of sacrifice, whether the government is democratic or autocratic. So you have to cheat to give the small democratic country a threat at exactly the right level for these measures to be imposed.