DOXA has spent years mining a short history of watches made for people who work underwater, most of it built around the oversized SUB 300 and its orange dial. Its first collaboration with Hodinkee reaches for something more obscure. The SUB Army 200T is modelled on a watch DOXA made in 1969 for the combat divers of the Swiss army, and the twist is size: where most DOXA divers are 42.5mm or larger, this one is a wearable 39mm. SJX covered it on 31 July 2026.
An army watch from a landlocked country
The premise sounds like a contradiction. Switzerland has no coastline and no navy, so its elite divers are army personnel, trained to operate in lakes, rivers, tunnels and under bridges. The watch made for them in 1969 has become one of the rarer pieces in DOXA's back catalogue. DOXA revived the Army several years ago, but at the full 42.5mm, which put it out of reach for anyone with a smaller wrist.
The Hodinkee edition fixes that. The cushion-shaped steel case is 39mm across and 10.7mm thick, which is unusually compact for a retro diver of this type, and it keeps the circular graining on the top surface that DOXA uses across the line. Water resistance is 200 metres, and the unidirectional bezel carries an aluminium insert anodised grey to match the dial.
The dial does the talking
The reason to want this watch is the dial. It was drawn specifically for the 1969 military issue, with a distinctive set of hour markers and a wide minute track, and it looks like nothing else in the current DOXA range. Here it is reworked with a faded, ghosted finish, a stamped granular texture and grey markings in place of the original black, filled with a warm faux-vintage lume. DOXA's oversized orange hands sit on top, a date window is set into the track at 3 o'clock, and the whole thing avoids the generic black-and-white treatment that most military-inspired watches settle for.
A workhorse movement at a fair price
The movement is a Sellita SW200-1, the automatic that most watches in this price bracket use. Modelled on the ETA 2824, it runs at 4 Hz with roughly 38 hours of reserve and adds hours, minutes, seconds and the date. It is plain, and at USD 2,000 that is the right call. The Army does not pretend to be a haute-horology object, and the appeal is the design and the history rather than the calibre.
The watch ships on a tan rubber strap with an additional fabric NATO. It is limited to 250 pieces, carries the reference 804.10.031.29-SE17, and is sold through Watches of Switzerland stores in the United States and Europe, alongside Hodinkee. Against the field, most of which is micro-brands using the same Sellita, DOXA's argument is the one thing those brands cannot buy: a real dive-watch history, and a design that came out of it rather than being drawn to look like it did.
