Ashen Claws - Chapter Combat Doctrine: Based on the eyewitness reports and evidence discovered by Battlefleet Vengeance, a Retribution Fleet of the IX (Blood Angels) Legion's 33rd Company during their sojourn into the Nostramo Sector in 017.M31, they encountered evidence of a mysterious Legiones Astartes force that had marauded across the sector on multiple worlds. They found spent bolt shells and fragments of battle-plate in a black and red heraldry that was unknown to them. The Blood Angels Tech-adepts were able to coax from several machines through interminable invocations and ritual, recordings that gave a disturbing insight into the final days of many of these ravaged worlds. Many of these planets, it seemed, had not been merely destroyed, but rendered into a warning for other systems in the sector, its armies utterly annihilated and its population herded into the depths of its hive cities before they collapsed were sealed within -- a price of their defiance. These tactics matched well the descriptions of the practices of the Dark Compliance inflicted by the Sons of Horus on a number of worlds during the Horus Heresy, yet many of the worlds in the Nostramo Sector were already sworn in service to the Warmaster's cause through their Night Lords masters and would seem an unlikely target for such terror tactics.In all of the scant reports of encounters between forces engaged in the grand wars of the Horus Heresy and the piratical warband known as the Ashen Claws, the forces of that enigmatic group have displayed a marked preference for the deployment of orbital interface craft, almost to the exclusion of other types of support unit. While, as with all the Legiones Astartes, the armoured transhuman infantry of the Space Marines remains the core of their operations, all of the great Legions supplement these forces with a variety of support units, each intended to fulfil a specific goal upon the field of battle. Not so the Ashen Claws; whether by necessity or tactical preference these raiders and pillagers deployed a variety of interface fighters, bombers and Assault Craft in support of their fast moving infantry forces, shunning the slower-moving armoured columns that typified some Legions.Perhaps this extreme military specialisation is a consequence of the supposed limited manpower and materiel available to such a splinter faction of the larger conflict, reinforced by need and circumstance. If this is so then it must be assumed that the Ashen Claws had already prosecuted war in this limited fashion for some time in order to explain their experience and skill in the deployment of such ad hoc formations and tactics. Honed perhaps to a keen edge on long since forgotten alien worlds in the deep black beyond the Imperium's borders, these tactics proved a deadly surprise to those forces they encountered on their return to Imperial space.As evidenced by the few recorded instances of the Ashen Claws in combat, their ground assaults are preceded by a wave of interface fighters and gunships, Storm Eagles and Primaris-Lightnings tasked with the elimination of anti-aircraft defences and key strongpoints. Following these craft are massed Kharybdis Assault Claw and Dreadclaw Drop Pod squadrons, packed with the fleet-moving infantry squads favoured by the Ashen Claws. Though lacking in certain patterns of more recently issued equipment, the raiding fleet known as the Ashen Claws seemed well supplied with the oft-maligned Drop Pod known as the Kharybdis Assault Claw, often deploying squadrons with abandon during the closing phases of a void battle. Operating in the deep void and within the atmosphere of a planet as both transport and heavy gunship, these craft appear to be one of the favoured transports for Veteran infantry units among the Ashen Claws. These infantry formations rarely sought to hold ground, instead seeking to suppress and circumvent the enemy's main strength and defeat him piecemeal. The aim of such attacks was almost always the seizure of munitions and weaponry rather than conquest or simple slaughter, a focus that left more conventionally-minded tacticians among the Legiones Astartes wrong-footed when facing them in battle.