Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and Military History — Attraction in Brussels

Quick Takeaways 🏛️ Impressive, monumental building — but showing signs of disrepair and graffiti 🏅 Wide range of exhibits, from medals to tanks 👕 Strong focus on Belgium’s pre–WWI history and empire ✈️ Large aircraft collection — dusty, underfunded, but still impressive 🚛 Good military vehicle display, though many outdoors are weather-worn 🚧 Some sections closed off, which was disappointing ⏱️ Allow at least 2+ hours to explore fully

Full Review

The building itself is immense and powerful, set in an impressive landscape. Sadly, it’s slipping into disrepair, with damaged features and graffiti marking what was once a gleaming beacon of Brussels.

Inside, the museum is packed with exhibits ranging from the smallest of medals to the largest of tanks. The heyday of the Belgian empire is strongly reflected in the vast collection of pre–First World War uniforms, equipment, and monuments celebrating the victories of the nation.

The museum’s different sections are spread across large halls. The aircraft collection, though very dusty and clearly showing signs of age and underinvestment, is still striking in its scale. Similarly, the military vehicles are impressive, though those left outdoors are clearly suffering from exposure to the elements.

Some areas of the museum were closed off, which was a little disappointing, but overall the visit left a very positive impression. It’s definitely worth going—just make sure to allow at least a couple of hours to explore...

I liked this museum a lot but at the same time I also hated it. I am quite conflicted about how to write this review.

The pros: the airplanes and tanks gallery is so cool there’s so much on offer in this museum it’s unbelievable. the place is huge. the WW2 gallery look decent

The cons: It feels like every part of this museum has its own museum curator who is doing whatever they like. Nothing fits with each other. There is no coherent story between each gallery. And even the airplanes gallery was a mix of civil and military display of different decades intermixed it isn’t fully clear what are they trying to tell us from this display. English description is only in some galleries but not in some. Why is this not consistent? the lighting is all messed up. Some of the galleries were so dark, it was hard to see anything. The museum is missing enough interaction and stories to keep you interested. the place is huge but the paths are mixed up. You start in a gallery but it is not clear the time chronology to follow. You choose whatever you want to visit. I guess that’s ok but a bit confusing. It would be nice if the museum tries to tell the story of wars starting with the ancient ways up to the modern days.

In a nutshell, this place is huge and has a lot of things, but it really could use a big revamp to be a cool museum that teaches and follows a consistent path rather than just a storage dump of armory related...

Awesome museum. The amount of information is huge. There are several exposition zones dedicated to different historical periods. WWI is phenomenal in that aspect.

The guns collection is huge. Extra points for having a Mosin-Nagant 🤩. Tha airplane collection is phenomenal too. They have an entire hangar full of historical and cult models like: Mig-17, F-16, F-4F, F-86, etc.

Having said that. There were a few drawbacks. The amount of information is huge but very little of it is translated to English. Because of that I spent +3 hrs on the “low hanging fruits” and when I was in the middle of the hangar I was told to leave because they were closing in 15 minutes.

I couldn’t even see the tank exposition 😔. I felt deeply disappointed because I spent quite sometime on the museum reviewing the details of the expositions but when I requested 5 more minutes to quickly finish having a glance at what I was missing on the plane’s hangar they said NO. The disappointing thing was that after I left there were people still leaving for the remaining 15 min.

As an advice, it would be great to warn visitors one hour before closing. With so much info the true fan can easily stay more than 4 hours.

On top of that, rest rooms were not in a good shape. Easily the worst rest rooms in Brussel’s museums and I visited over a dozen...