Hardly any watch accessory bears a name that is so thoroughly misunderstood. Most people assume that the NATO strap gets its name from NATO itself, the military alliance that supposedly designed or commissioned it. That is not entirely true. The real story is more low-key, more British, and actually even more interesting.
The true origin
In 1973, the British Ministry of Defence issued a new standard for equipment, Def Stan 66-15, titled simply "Strap, Wrist Watch." The requirement was for a robust watch strap, simple to manufacture and easy to replace, that would also function reliably in field operations. The result was exactly the strap known today by the name "NATO." It is 280 mm long, 20 mm wide, consists of tightly woven nylon, and features chrome-plated brass hardware.
The name was not derived from NATO as an organization, but from an administrative detail. The strap was recorded in the British supply system with a NATO Stock Number, a numbering system that many NATO armed forces used collectively to catalog equipment. From this stock number, it was colloquially dubbed "the NATO strap." Among military personnel, however, a different name caught on. They called it the G10, named after the G1098 form that a soldier had to fill out to requisition one from the supply depot.
Better safe than sorry
What sets the strap apart technically is a simple but clever trick. Instead of a single strip of fabric, it consists of two layers of nylon, both of which run underneath the watch case. If one of the two spring bars breaks, the watch remains attached to the wrist, held by the second bar. For a piece of equipment that could not afford to be lost in the field, this was not just a detail, but the actual function.
The Bond myth that isn't one
One image has burned itself particularly deeply into the collective memory: Sean Connery appearing in 1964's "Goldfinger" with a striped Rolex Submariner on his wrist. Many tell this moment as the birth of the NATO strap. Chronologically, that is simply impossible, as the film came out nine years before the actual Def Stan standard. What Connery wore was a simple, single-layer nylon strip, not a genuine G10 construction. Nevertheless, this image did popularize something: the striped look that is still associated with the NATO strap today, even though the original was simply in Admiralty Grey. The colored striped patterns were added later when individual regiments wanted to wear straps in their respective unit colors.
From the field to daily life
What began as purely practical has since developed far beyond its military origins. Lightweight, quick to change, and resistant to water and weather—the very same qualities that made it useful for the military make it an obvious choice today for anyone who wears a watch daily rather than just owning one.
That is exactly what interests us about the NATO strap. Not a piece of jewelry meant to be pampered, but a piece of thoughtful, honest functionality and a story worth telling correctly.