The concept of terrorist organizations as complex adaptive systems (CAS) has generated an abundance of models focused on understanding the inherent structural strengths and weaknesses of the organizations with the ultimate goal of disruption and defeat. However, in-depth theoretical analyses combining first-principles of CAS to understanding terrorist organizations as dynamical systems remain few. Specifically, while most experts acknowledge the key role that innovation and learning play in providing terrorist organizations with the capacity to adapt, there is a paucity of systematic treatment of the topic of what influences innovation and learning - and the difference between the two - in these covert organizations. This paper reviews the organizing principles, behavior characteristics, and mechanisms of learning and innovation in complex adaptive systems; discusses how other authors have applied these principles to understanding terrorist organizations; and introduces the constraints imposed by the need for secrecy in these covert organizations. In doing so, I provide a theoretically grounded framework that combines understanding of innovation and learning within covert organizations from a system dynamics perspective with first principles of complex adaptive systems to predict under what conditions innovation is likely to occur within terrorist organizations. Historical evidence of terrorist organizations and their activities over more than thirty years supports the qualitative predictions of the framework.
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