Benrus, an American watch manufacturer founded in 1921, is probably best known by enthusiasts these days for the now-rare and highly collectible field watches it produced for the U.S. military back in the 1970s and ’80s. Relaunched in 2020 after a long hiatus from watchmaking, Benrus already looks to be embracing that aspect of its past to inform its modern collection, Exhibit A being the reissued Type I Limited Edition, which dropped last November.

The Benrus Type I Limited Edition revives a rare military model from the 1970s.

As the first watch manufacturer to secure a military contract during the Vietnam War, Benrus produced the original Benrus Type I from 1972 through 1980. It was designed to meet a specific set of criteria set out by the U.S. Department of Defense, which required a purpose-built timepiece suitable for use by covert and overt military specialist teams such as Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and Green Berets. These criteria included a then-unprecedented depth rating of 1,200 feet below, and 35,000 feet above, sea level, as well as an automatic movement that could resist extreme impacts and temperatures. Benrus made about 16,000 models of the Type I (in both its Class A and Class B variants, the former differentiated by luminous markers), issuing them to Vietnam-era Elite Forces, but never made them available to the public ? hence their desirability on the collectors’ market.
The reissue of the Type I, which is limited to just 1,000 piece...