They're MILSTRIP items - shipped through the military supply system. So you can't just poop-can them even if they're useless. The smart thing would have been for the warehouse guys to issue them to themselves, then throw them into the recycling bin.
Instead, they processed DRMO paperwork to ship them to Tobyhanna. I stepped in at that point and contacted DRMO to have them downgraded to scrap. Then, like I said, there were three levels of bureaucracy and two weeks of time before I could recycle them, including wet-ink signatures that had to be scanned and emailed back and forth.
Anyway, it turns out that my shop was not supposed to be touching DRMO deal at all, and we were removed from the process entirely. Fine by me.