I suspect you misunderstand the purpose of the unit. Of course the announcement is full of buzzwords and isn't exactly an exercise in clarity. Plus the MoD don't exactly like to tell people what they're up to at the best of times.
However I think this is an attempt to merge work in the areas of communications, electronic warfare (hence stuff about the electromagnetic space) and computer security cyber-defence / attack.
Look up the old Israeli military operation "Outside the Box" - great name by the way. This was to destroy Syria's nuclear research reactore before it could be fuelled up - because Israel didn't want them to develop nuclear weapons. In the same way they destroyed Saddam Hussein's french-built reactor back in 1981. The interesting point is that Syria's air defence network switched itself off, just before the attack. I think this was before Israel had got stealth fighters - but they've got plenty of electronic warfare capabilities - so they could have done the raid and just jammed or suppressed Syria's radars. But they didn't - they did something sneaky to switch the whole air defence network off. Was this a sneaky cyber-attack - some special forces with explosives taking out the power supplies or an inside job? I've not seen an answer to that question.
But clearly this whole area is getting increasingly important. There are now many weapons systems where you can fire a missile from one asset which is targetted, or sometimes even directly controlled, by another. F-35 can do radar networking, where the raw data from the radars of several planes can all share each other's raw data, in order to build a much more accurate picture than one plane could do alone. In similar ways to astronomers using arrays of sensors over a large area to get higher resolution. This also makes the radars more resistant to jamming. But with the downside that you've now networked your planes, which makes them more susceptible to detection and jamming of their network.
The MoD have also just announced that their next generation air defence ships (due sometime in the mid to late 2030s) are going to be a system-of-systems. Where the ship has got backup barges to carry extra missiles for them, but also can share it's sensors with the other ships, drones, satellites and aircraft around it. There are also several countries and alliances looking at constellations of low orbit satellites specifically to track tactical missle launches - so that air defences can be activated in time to deal with them - given this tech is proliferating alarmingly. Up until a couple of years ago there'd only be a couple of ballistic missile attacks on ships, and none successful, the Houthis have been lobbing a couple a week - plus various cheap and medium priced drones and anti-ship cruise miissiles. Plus trying to defend Ukraine from Russian missile and drone attacks has been difficult. As part of this system they announced they were going to invest in networked sensing and targetting now. This fits with a lot of our spiral development, that looks to actually be working quite well. You design capabilities now with room for future growth or the possibility of repurposing - and then you keep researching and designing these new capabilities while getting the benefit of having a less shiny version to use right now. Better, once the new system works, you've already got the manufacturing capacity to go straight into building the new shiny, and may even be able to upgrade your existing kit to the new standards.
All this networked weaponry is incredibly vulnerable to having its networks and comms attacked. As well as being incredibly useful. So not only will you want to protect yours, you'lll also want to deny theirs to the enemy.
This actually looks to be joined-up thinking from the MoD. I don't say they won't fuck it up, but what they're doing makes actual sense.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
