In 2011, ISIS (then under the name of the Islamic State of Iraq) intervened in the Syrian Civil War and attacked the regime in Damascus, along with its allies (Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah) as well as moderate and Islamist Syrian opposition forces. In 2014, with the outcome of the Syrian conflict still in the balance, ISIS launched a major offensive into Iraq, thereby massively expanding the opposing coalition to include Iraq, Iranian-trained militias, the United States, Britain, and France. Unperturbed, ISIS then struck Kurdistan, and the ranks of its enemies swelled further.

By conventional logic, the militants’ strategy is reckless and even suicidal—the design of an apocalyptic cult with a death wish.

On one side of the battlefield there’s ISIS, with its tens of thousands of fighters.

On the other side of the battlefield is the anti-ISIS coalition, which includes four out of five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, Britain, and France). Even the sole holdout, China, has signaled it may aid the Iraqi regime through intelligence-sharing and arms sales. The coalition also includes most regional players: Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, and the Gulf states. Did I mention that the most powerful non-state actors in the region, including Hezbollah and the Kurds, are also arrayed against ISIS?

In 2014, ISIS brought in estimated revenues of just over $1 billion. In the same year, the U.S military budget alone was $580 billion. Heck, each year the U.S. military spends about half of ISIS’s revenue just on marching bands. The anti-ISIS coalition has an enormous edge in both quantity and quality of troops, including formidable air power and surveillance capacity.

On paper, this could be the greatest mismatch in the history of war. And yet after a year of U.S. bombing, ISIS has fought the coalition to a draw, by maintaining its core territory and expanding its control into Anbar province in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. In September, Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the battlefield was “tactically stalemated.”

Why can such a grand military coalition do no better than a tie? A lot of attention has been paid to ISIS’s innovative tactics: its “shock and awe” suicide bombings, horrific decapitations, and social-media campaigns. But it’s also worthwhile to consider why seemingly strong coalitions are often much weaker than they look.

ISIS is not the first revolutionary group to take on the world and overcome the odds. In the 1790s, revolutionary France fought Austria, Prussia, Britain, Russia, Holland, Spain, Portugal, and Piedmont in Italy. For the next two decades, France defeated its adversaries and created a vast European empire—until Napoleon Bonaparte finally overreached with the invasion of Russia.

A century later, from 1917 to 1922, the young Bolshevik regime in Russia battled domestic White Russian opponents, as well as an international coalition that included the United States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and Japan. Despite facing a seemingly insurmountable challenge, the Red Army emerged victorious.