There’s nothing quite like the feel and utility of an issued military watch. 

That being said, issued watches — especially the vintage kind — are somewhat like museum pieces. Fragile, important, and suffused with a sense of history, some are reluctant to give these watches wrist-time, and the caution is understandable.

This is why timepieces like CWC’s 1980 Royal Navy Diver are so awesome. Reproduced to look like their vintage counterparts, they’re thoroughly modern watches, begging to be used and abused like any well designed tool. The 1980 Royal Navy Diver, in particular, is a reproduction of an automatic watch issued to Royal Navy clearance divers over 40 years ago. Made by Cabot Watch Company, the original is extremely rare.

Housed in a 41mm stainless steel case with a sapphire crystal, an unsigned crown, and a luminous, unidirectional rotating dive bezel with a fully graduated minute scale, it features a black dial with circled ‘T’, large, luminous wedge and triangular indices, luminous ‘sword’ hands, and an outer white minute track. Though the lume used is Super-LumiNova, rather than Tritium, the vintage look of the color employed gives the impression of a watch that’s seen several decades of use.

Powered by the workhorse automatic ETA 2824-2 movement, the 1980 Royal Navy Diver comes fitted to an olive-colored single-pass NATO-style textile strap with a ‘broad arrow’ insignia and stainless steel hardware. A spitting image of the issued original, it even features ‘issue’ markings on the caseback, and is accompanied by its factory goodies.

If you love the look of vintage military-issue watches but don’t want the fuss, you can’t do much better than this contemporary beauty from CWC!