This chapter reconstructs FirstGeneration Warfare (1GW) as a socio-technical regime in which linear formations, disciplined drill, and centralised command cohere with emergent fiscal-military institutions. Moving beyond a narrowly tactical account, the chapter situates the Napoleonic system within its political-economic matrix: levée en masse, fiscal capacity, and nascent bureaucratic logistics that together enabled sustained mass mobilisation. Through a careful exposition of 1GW’s tactical logic—volley fire, column-and-line manoeuvre, corps organisation—and a focused case study on Austerlitz (1805), the chapter demonstrates how deception, tempo, and organisational design produced strategic effects far out of proportion to force size. It then traces the transition mechanisms—rail, telegraph, industrial logistics, doctrinal reform—that rendered linear tactics increasingly brittle and prepared the ground for Second-Generation Warfare. Methodologically pluralist, the analysis combines primary campaign accounts, classic military history, and the book’s integrated theoretical frame (Realism; Hegemonic Stability Theory; AI & Cognitive Systems Theory; Idealism) to show continuity between material practice and emergent epistemic forms of authority. The chapter concludes by arguing that 1GW’s strengths (cohesion, mass) contained latent fractures—logistical strain, communicative fragility, and political overreach—that catalysed doctrinal evolution. Read genealogically, 1GW is both origin and caution: paradigmatic formation whose institutional and moral legacies continue to shape modern conflicts.