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Phil Cooper, whose son received £200,000 in compensation for injuries received in Iraq, condemned the bonuses as "absolutely disgusting".
But the home secretary, Alan Johnson, said today that the recipients did "difficult and sometimes dangerous" jobs, including going to the frontline to support troops.
MoD civil servants pointed out that they were paid less than the troops. The MoD said the average payout would be less than £1,000.
The payments were revealed in the House of Commons after questions from Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary.
Johnson told GMTV: "I think we need to find more detail about what MoD civil servants do, what they get the bonuses for, before you say this is unjustified.
"Our priority always has to be the soldiers at the frontline for equipment, for pay, for conditions." But, he said, civil servants had to go "into the frontline" to, for example, develop mechanisms to protect troops from improvised explosive devices.
"When they do that my understanding is they work 17, 18 hours in Afghanistan. They don't get overtime for that – they get a bonus to compensate."
MoD "civvies" also defended the system on the Army Rumour Service Arrse, an internet chatroom widely used by troops. One, calling himself scruff_2, said: "I am a MoD civvie. I have been in the MoD for 13 years. My basic is 18k a year. My bonus this year was £380."
Another, jim30, said: "We are not exactly being paid banker level bonuses here, and most people would rather that they used this pool of money to pay us properly, rather than this current sham of a scheme."
But another user, MrPVRd, criticised the decision to pay bonuses at a time when routine training for the Territorial Army was being suspended to save money - a decision that the government reversed last month.
"It beggars belief that these were to be paid at the same time that committed TA training was to be scrapped," he wrote.
Christine Bonner, whose son Darren died fighting with the 1st Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment in Afghanistan in May 2007 said the payouts were "money for old rope" while troops on the ground were struggling for lack of equipment.
The MoD said about 50,000 staff were expected to receive the bonuses and last year the average bonus for a senior civil servant in the MoD was £8,000.
A total of £288m has been paid out in bonuses to civil servants since 2003 – the year Britain went to war in Iraq – according to official figures. There are 85,000 civil servants at the MoD, one for every two active troops.
The details of the latest payouts emerged on Remembrance Day, just 24 hours after the bodies of six soldiers were flown back to Britain, bringing to 232 the number killed in Afghanistan since operations began in 2001.
The current rate of fatalities has not been seen among British armed forces since the Falklands war.
Earlier this week Gordon Brown faced embarrassment when he spoke on the telephone with Jacqui Janes, whose son Jamie died in Afghanistan last month, about whether there were sufficient resources for helicopters to help injured soldiers.
Liam Fox said many in the armed forces would be aghast at the bonus payments. "This will only increase the view that the armed forces and the MoD administration are hugely out of balance," he said.
Colonel Bob Stewart, the former commander of UN forces in Bosnia, said: "I am absolutely staggered. No civil servant should be getting any kind of a bonus when our country is broke and our troops are fighting for their lives."
Hazel Hunt said she took great exception to bonuses paid for "exceptional performance".
"They are not delivering and I think it is obscene they have got such bonuses while our troops are being short changed – not only in equipment but also in the fact that my son was barely on £17,000 a year," she said.
"You wouldn't imagine a single civil servant going out to the frontline for that money. When you consider the risk they are running of being killed is one in 40 on the frontline and you have got more than that being injured ... how many civil servants would volunteer for that?"
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