Panerai's modern catalogue can feel a long way from its origins, so it is worth remembering that the brand started as a supplier of instruments, not a maker of luxury goods. From the mid-1930s it built luminous depth gauges, compasses and watches for the frogmen of Italy's Decima Flottiglia MAS, using the radium-based compound it had patented as Radiomir in 1916. A partnership with the U.S. Navy SEALs, the contemporary heirs to that kind of work, is therefore less of a marketing stretch than it first appears. The Submersible Navy SEALs PAM01738 is the newest result, and unlike most of the SEALs pieces before it, it is a core, non-limited model.
A 44mm case built to take a beating
The case is 44mm of brushed stainless steel, fitted with Panerai's signature crown-protecting lever and a black rubber-clad screw-down crown. The unidirectional dive bezel uses a scratch-resistant matte black ceramic insert with a single luminous dot at noon, and the twelve-sided screw-down caseback carries a medallion engraved with the American flag and the Navy SEALs name. Water resistance is 500m, which is where this watch separates itself from the Submersible Marina Militare references it otherwise resembles.
Panerai is also unusually specific about what the watch survived in testing. It cites 5,000g shock impacts, 19,000 bezel rotations, 10,000 activations of the crown-protecting lever, exposure to extreme thermal swings, and water-resistance testing that exceeded the rated 500m by 25 percent. None of that is the sort of thing most owners will ever demand of the watch, but it is the sort of thing the name on the caseback is meant to imply.
The dial does one clever thing
The headline detail is the lume. In daylight the dial is a grey gradient with a grained surface, with applied indices that Panerai says are 20 percent wider than its standard markers. In the dark it splits into two colours. The hour markers, hour hand and small-seconds counter glow green, while the minute hand and the dot at noon on the bezel glow blue. That is not decoration. It lets a diver isolate the minute hand and the bezel pip, the two elements that matter for tracking immersion time, without hunting through a field of identical green dots. The date sits at 3 o'clock against a black disc with silver numerals, and the small seconds takes the form of a recessed bull's-eye.
ValFleurier inside, with a three-day reserve
The movement is the calibre P.980, an automatic built by ValFleurier, the Richemont group's shared movement facility. It runs at 28,800vph, is 4.2mm thick, holds 23 jewels and stores a three-day power reserve from a single barrel. It is fitted with an Incabloc anti-shock system and a transversal balance bridge for rigidity, and it hacks, so a diver can synchronise to the exact second before a mission. That last point is the kind of detail Panerai likes to draw a straight line from: the frogman timing a charge, the modern diver timing a stop.
Two straps, one price
The watch ships with a tool-free quick-release system and two straps in the box, a tactical black rubber strap and a rugged grey canvas one. The Submersible Navy SEALs PAM01738 reaches Panerai boutiques worldwide in July 2026, priced at EUR 12,100. More detail is on panerai.com.
The read
Stripped of the story, this is a 44mm, 500m steel diver with a clever two-tone lume layout and a strong movement, and it sits in a crowded part of Panerai's range. The military partnership is what sets it apart, and whether that lands depends on how much the engraving on the back means to the buyer. The two-tone lume, at least, is a genuinely functional idea rather than a badge, and it is the part of the PAM01738 most worth carrying forward into the rest of the Submersible line.
