For Clausewitz, war was first and foremost a political act, and thus the purpose of all strategy was to achieve the political goal that the state was seeking to accomplish. As such, Clausewitz famously argued that war was the "continuation of politics by other means", and as such, argued that the amount of force used by the state would and should be proportional to whatever the political aim that the state was seeking to achieve via war. Clausewitz further dismissed "geometry" as an insignificant factor in strategy, believing instead that ideally all wars should follow the Napoleonic concept of victory through a decisive battle of annihilation and destruction of the opposing force, at any cost. However, he also recognized that his ideal of how war should be fought was not always practical in reality and that limited warfare could influence policy by wearing down the opposition through a "strategy of attrition".