Islamic State is an idea made material. That a notion can become so rapidly manifest in the real world is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
Its strength lies in its appeal as a victorious organisation that has had the sheer nerve to declare itself the Islamic State (IS).
This is a notion that fires romantic and idealistic fantasies of Muslim purity and a return to the golden era of the past Caliphates.
It is reinforced with old-fashioned money.
The so-called Islamic State is the richest terrorist organisation ever seen.
It earns an estimated $1-$3m (£600,000 - £1.8m) a day from oil smuggling operations, having captured two thirds of Syria's crude operations and about 10% of Iraq's.
Militants are also extorting people and imposing taxes Most of the refined product, from small "artisanal refineries", is smuggled into Turkey.
But according to Peter Neumann at Kings College, London, at least 80% of its revenue comes from taxation and extortion from the six million people it now rules over.
A further cash injection of $400m (£245m) was grabbed in a single day in June when the movement overran the Iraqi city of Mosul and robbed its central bank.
This, combined with $125m (£76.6m) in earnings from hostage ransoms and at least another $10m (£6.1m) for the sale of rare antiquities stolen from the region's museums, has resulted in a cash bonanza that has boosted recruitment.
Iraqi forces were attacked in Mosul where the central bank was robbed It's now estimated that 40%, at least, of IS fighters and volunteers are foreigners. So many have poured in from Tunisia and Libya that they have been organised into fully-formed homogeneous fighting units.
British foreigners fighting in Syria and Iraq are estimated to number about 500. Many of them are now with IS - although they are seldom used on the front line unless as suicide bombers because they're seen as poor fighters lacking the tough backgrounds of those from less-developed countries.
In trying to establish itself as a "state", IS has opened itself up to vulnerabilities that its rival in the extremist world, al Qaeda, has managed to avoid.
To run oil operations, collect taxes, and launder criminal earnings it needs structures. It needs roads, refineries, finance offices, all the weights of bureaucracies that cannot be hidden.
So they have been attacked by the American led coalition - most lately 12 small refineries were reported to have been destroyed by the Pentagon in the east of Syria close to the border with Iraq.
It fights conventional warfare - using tanks, artillery and other heavy weapons. These will be vulnerable to air attack, too.
So it is possible that it could be "degraded" - a term used more often by David Cameron and Barack Obama than "destroyed" - because both leaders know that wiping out IS is not a campaign that can be fought on the ground but in the minds of its supporters.
If, and only if, substantial numbers of ground forces from Sunni tribes, Syria's opposition, the Kurds and Iraq's army and militia can be mustered to drive the extremists back under cover of airstrikes it might be possible to squeeze it out of business in the physical world.
It will take generations of subtle theological and theoretical argument, which can only be made by great Islamic scholars, to undermine the ideas that have given birth to IS and al Qaeda monsters.
And monsters don't do subtle.
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