Contractors are ubiquitous on today’s battlefields. I focus on a key factor that affects the likelihood that western PMSC personnel will adopt the norms of the military personnel whom they supplement—the degree to which they are accorded status as members of the military profession by elite members of the military profession. The greater their acceptance, the more likely they will behave like military professionals. I assess hypotheses based upon two aspects of identity—role and social—with the responses of 985 elite field-grade American officers collected annually from 2007 to 2010. I find that evoking different aspects of identity in these officers leads to differential rates of acceptance of contractors as members of the professional military in-group.