What did Bannon mean when he said that Rice "operationalized" the NSC? [closed]

Solution 1:

The meaning is explained in the book Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power:

This mission is often cited as marking the “operationalization” of the national security advisor and the NSC—a dangerous line to have crossed in light of mistakes made with later NSC “operations” such as Iran-Contra.

The Yale Law Journal also has a section heading:

The NSC Operationalized

Similarly, the operationalization of the NSC commenced not with the peregrinations of Oliver North, or Robert McFarlane's odyssey to Tehran with Bible and birthday cake, but with Henry Kissinger's secret trip to mainland China...

Also, from the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee record:

Six months after the fact, we learned that the President has "operationalized" the NSC, secretly dispatching his National Security Assistant abroad to conduct discussions with foreign leaders that ran contrary to our public position.

The law creating the NSC stated :

The function of the Council shall be to advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security so as to enable the military services and the other departments and agencies of the Government to cooperate more effectively in matters involving the national security

So "operationalized" is relative to the "advise" function originally set forth.

Solution 2:

It doesn't fit in context with me either. To "-ize" something is to change its nature.

Weaponize - make a weapon version. Dehumanize - render someone less than human.

Then again, Bannon tends to come up with a lot of terms that don't make that much sense, to the point where I'm convinced he's trying to sound "military" and failing badly. In this case, his usage of "operationalize" implies that the NSC was originally tasked to be passive oversight of the nation's security apparatus, not an active participant via Rice's leadership (not that this actually went on, just trying to get a handle on how Bannon sees it.)