Cyber anything isn't the solution.

The solution is best practices, succinctly expressed, regularly updated, and loosely expressed but tightly enforced over years.

Because tomorrow's device environment is not bought today. It's bought today-and-every-day-for-the-past-30-years.

And securing the entire environment is the key goal.

The problem with that is that practical cyber security is essentially about the "structural soundness" of a huge infrastructure that's mostly civilian and mostly private, about the resilience of private company internal systems and consumer products - a "cyber force" (no matter how strong or large) has neither authorisation nor practical ability to come in the servers and systems of every important private organization (some large, some quite small - e.g. municipal water infrastructure orgs whose "IT" is a contractor booked for a couple hours per week) and change them so that they'd be more defensible.

There is already a cyber force. It is called Cyber Command

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command

A unified command is different than an actual branch of the military

Is it actually important to have a dedicated branch? I legitimately don't know the benefits/drawbacks.

As it is now, each service branch has their own cyber operations and command structure for them, and they are all beholden to the central cyber command for strategic coordination. But how the day to day is played out is determined by each branch by itself.

There's pros and cons so it depends on who you ask

This is quite literally true for anything and everything and frankly adds nothing to this thread

Interestingly north Norway (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Cyber_Defence_Forc...) and Germany (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_and_Information_Domain...) have created cyber branches in their armed forces as peers to the traditional Army/Navy/Air Force branches. I’m curious how this will play out.

I would argue that it's orders of magnitudes more necessary than a Space Force. after decades of relatively slow advancement, i fail to see why it's vital in 2021 to dedicate an entire branch of the military to space. An area which they have virtually no access to. OTOH, cyber warfare is very real, available and probably more effective then anything short of nuclear warfare.