Ever daydreamed about being the buffed-up, oil-slicked, bullet-dodging protagonist in an explosive action film set piece? Course you have. Now New York-based tour company Covert Venture Joint Task Force (CVJTF) could make those cinematic dreams a reality.
In collaboration with former intelligence experts from military units like Mossad, the CIA and the
SAS, this adventure experience company has created a series of multi-day, “military intelligence
field simulations” that lets participants pretend they’re in their very own macho blockbusters.
“[We curate] intel games that push civilians and professionals to think and work smarter in real-world conditions,” is how founder Timofey Yuriev describes their USP, although in this case “real world conditions” could include a mission to rescue a doctor from a cartel prison in the jungle, retrieving a cache of biological weapons from a plane crash, or storming a nuclear-weapon hoarding terrorist cell in the desert.
“It’s about elite training and collaboration with diverse specialists in an adventurous context,” says Yuriev, whose unusual upbringing partly explains his segue into this strange corner of the adventure industry. Born into a family of military scientists, he grew up on a Soviet nuclear testing site in north-west Kazakhstan. Although he currently resides north of New York City, he spent much of his childhood between there and Siberia’s vast, frozen landscapes, learning survival skills from his huntsman grandfather.
These experiences formed the basis for the first incarnation of CVJTF, set up in 2010 as an extreme travel agency that offered freediving trips in underground rivers and paragliding expeditions. The portfolio has now evolved to include military operations using infrastructure built for special forces training across the globe.
These experiences – which cost from US$10,000 per day, and last from five to 15 days – are customised to each client’s needs, desires and abilities. Given the cost and level of physical expertise required, most of today’s demographic are extreme-sport athletes, those looking to experience elite military simulations in a safe context, or business executives and venture capitalists who fancy a bit of next-level team building bravado.
In the future, though, Yuriev hopes to make these trips more accessible, with a series of one and two-day simulations in the US, and even, perhaps inevitably, branching out into reality TV.
“Right now, we’re at the stage where we can use special forces in the United States so we can create a TV show here,” he says. “The participants will be civilians from all layers of society and the assimilated experiences will include getting in undetected through the security of a skyscraper.” Sounds like the perfect opportunity for the wannabe Schwarzenegger in all of us.
More on CVJTF at covertventure.com
Author - Cristina Slattery
Original: http://nmagazine.
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