What Makes a Tough Tactical Watch “Tactical"?

This may end up a little confusion, somebody probably said that what makes a tactical watch "tactical" is an only marketing gimmick, it’s just the styling of an item. Although technically any watches you use to check TIME it can be considered "tactical" but other than that it can mean many different things, because, in my opinion, word tactical mean to achieve or obtaining particular goal, or certain objectives.

So your tactical watch can be anything if it enables you to achieve the goal you are after... such as telling the time perhaps, if, on the other hand, your goal is to be the CEO of your company by mid afternoon, and you are currently only the doorman then you are going to need a much smarter watch.

Tactical in a military sense means you are involved in military operations, which usually are part of dealing with some kind of adversary and the tactics are to achieve the goal of defeating him. So, telling the time so you can do things in the right order would be a handy thing for a watch to do, if you want to shoot the enemy, the watch will not be a lot of good other than to tell you when to fire at him if a particular time is part of the tactics, but the real tactic is going to be to shoot him with a rifle or blow him with a missile or a smart bomb but it still only means the watch has to tell the time.

In that case providing it was working well, a Mickey Mouse watch would be as tactical as any other

Having said that, I think we should start with defining the difference between a watch with “tactical features” and watch for “tactical missions”.

Tactical Features
Tactical features would be things like a Compass or GPS, Chronograph, Tide Graph, 'round trajectory calculator’ or maybe watch with a small flashlight and others complicated and sophisticated features, which are become very handy in some case if you really need that kind of features.

Tactical Mission
This kind of watches that would be probably being desirable in some sort of a military environment when you are dealing with a high stress environment or involved in military operations, you need watches, which not only telling the time, but also something reliable, tough, good illumination, simple enough, yet easy to read.

As far as additional "features" are concerned, I don't really know much since I'm not in the military, but I would guess that stopwatches or chronographs might come in handy at times. Other than that, I think that the ruggedness and readability of the watch are the most important factor.