It's the same story with "Cyber" as with flying - it sounds cooler then it is once
you get to the reality of the activity, and it takes considerable effort and time investment
to get to a comfort level. Something our beloved kids these days don't have much of.
There also probably some conflict between the more outgoing "adventure" type of kids who
would join and be successful in CAP (traditionally), and the type who are excited sitting
in a dim room scanning network ports and parsing text files, however at least in a CAP context,
you can't do the latter without also doing the former.
This is what the media portrays as "cyber defense":

Get ready to "Hack the Gibson!"
While this is the reality of the job day-to-day (assuming you leave the house):

Don't get me wrong, these are important jobs in a field that is growing (in the short term), but it
takes a special breed of cat to sit in a cube all day and comb through this sort of screen for hours...

...looking to find some 12-year old running a script from his Aunt's basement trying to hack V-Bucks.
(Maybe if "Mitnick" up there wasn't running Spotify and Outlook on a server console he'd have less issues...)One of the other issues is that Cyber Defense is a pretty narrow field and focus, one which is increasingly being
assumed by AI. There will always be people minding the store, but in 10 years? It'll all be AI doing the security.
Moving away from the "Cyber Defense" focus and into general software development would at least offer
more directly relevent career skills, but of course the USAF doesn't build cloud-based collaborative systems
or games.
I've been in IT for some 30 years (gee-zus I'm old as dirt), and have watched it evolve from dumb terminals to local systems
back to what are essentially "smart dumb terminals" on a vector which has made hardware almost "free" and user
support increasingly "rip and replace". It's not there yet, but I'm glad I'm nearing the twilight of my career vs the mid-point.
It'll all be back-room soon, with again, AI doing the bulk of the heavy lifting.