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The Gaia-ESO Survey was designed to target all major Galactic components (i.e., bulge, thin and thick discs, halo and clusters), with the goal of constraining the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Milky Way. This paper presents the methodology and considerations that drive the selection of the targeted, allocated and successfully observed Milky Way field stars. The detailed understanding of the survey construction, specifically the influence of target selection criteria on observed Milky Way field stars is required in order to analyse and interpret the survey data correctly. We present the target selection process for the Milky Way field stars observed with VLT/FLAMES and provide the weights that characterise the survey target selection. The weights can be used to account for the selection effects in the Gaia-ESO Survey data for scientific studies. We provide a couple of simple examples to highlight the necessity of including such information in studies of the stellar populations in the Milky Way., ES, LH, SF, GRR and TB acknowledge support from the project grant ‘The New Milky Way’ from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. RS acknowledges support from NCN/Poland through grant 2014/15/B/ST9/03981. AJK acknowledges support by the Swedish National Space Board. Based on data products from observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory under programme ID 188.B-3002. These data products have been processed by the CASU at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, and by the FLAMES/UVES reduction team at INAF/Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri. These data have been obtained from the GaiaESO Survey Data Archive, prepared and hosted by the Wide Field Astronomy Unit, Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, which is funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. This work was partly supported by the European Union FP7 programme through ERC grant number 320360 and by the Leverhulme Trust through grant RPG-2012-541. We acknowledge the support from INAF and Ministero dell’ Istruzione, dell’ Universita’` e della Ricerca (MIUR) in the form of the grant ‘Premiale VLT 2012’. The results presented here benefit from discussions held during the Gaia-ESO workshops and conferences supported by the ESF (European Science Foundation) through the GREAT Research Network Programme. Based on observations obtained as part of the VHS, ESO Program, 179.A-2010 (PI: McMahon). Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Energy Office of Science., This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Oxford University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw1011