Exercise Aries

Exercise Aries, officially Counter-Terrorism Exercise Aries is an emergency preparedness exercise for counter-terrorism units and emergency units for the situation of multiple stages of a terrorist attack that will occur between Christmas and New Year, because of the importance of the time correlating to the chances of a terrorist attack being committed. It is planned to be the first in a series of exercises on this topic and will involve AIN nations, randomly picked from a list of applicants. The importance of this exercise is that it is the first of it's kind to be performed in the union.

The exercise involves counter-terrorism of three stages of a terrorist attack, the planning, execution and aftermath. The stages went from raiding a specific building which is base for a terrorist cell to stopping a terrorist attack before it can be committed while in transit to the target, and then the emergency response to the execution of a terrorist attack which include paramedics, counter-terrorism forces, fire-brigades and investigators as well as possible specialised unites such as paramedics for Biological or Nuclear attacks or hostage negotiators.

The objective of the exercise is to spot flaws or outstanding/impressive events during the performance of the stages to refine the counter-terrorism capabilities to AIN nations as well as to study psychological preparedness in the public to the threat of a terrorist attack. The exercise was inspired by a raise in the prediction of terrorist incidents for 2013 set by AINSI, the recent 2013 AINSummit where one of the topics brought up was Counter-Terrorism and organised crime reduction , and by Exercise Northstar V in Singapore, which was similar to the concept of this exercise.

Applications
Applications to take part in the exercise started 17 November to both identify who will be willing to take part as well as listing the nations that will be randomised. Only three of the nations of all the applications will be taking part in the exercise and will be picked randomly. There are currently 7 countries who showed interest and applied. Applications close on 4 December to allow time for planning the exercises in the three different countries.