A week after the French soldiers’ parade in Paris, it will be the Belgian soldiers to parade in Brussels on Monday for the National Day of July 21. With a big difference: most soldiers will be masked.
“Discretion, a question of life or death”
“Our soldiers do not hide their faces by shyness, but out of responsibility,” the Belgian Defense Minister, Theo Francken, said on Tuesday on the social network X. “Some of our units wear a” buff ” – a tactical scarf that covers the face just below. It is not a choice of style, but a deliberate security measure. In the era of artificial intelligence and advanced video technologies, discretion has become a question of life or death, “he continues.
“Thanks to the boom in powerful AI systems and supercalculators, it is now technically perfectly possible to detect, recognize and associate faces with digital identities, even with an image of poor quality or partially obscured,” he wrote. “In the AI era, discretion is not a sign of weakness, but foresight. »»
According to RTL Info, this safety measure, which has so far been reserved for elite units, will not concern students of the Royal Military School and the High Grades.
A military union denounces a “paranoia”
“I think we fall a little in paranoia. I do not very well understand this decision to parade our soldiers with a mask, ”reacted Philippe Sion, delegate of the main Belgian military union, ACMP-CGPM. “I could see that the French soldiers who paraded on July 14 did not bear. So I do not very well understand this decision which is made by our minister, ”he continued, quoted by RTL Info.
The Belgian national holiday takes place every year on July 21 due to the swearing in of the first king of the Belgians, Léopold I, on July 21, 1831. The parade, military and civil, has been organized since 1905. It generally takes place on Place des Palais in Brussels.
