Golf Bravo Zulu:
My own experience was also with dark blue floaty things and we certainly had very few drop tanks in storage. I'm not in the least surprised that other services had mountains of drop tanks lying in storage.
The real scandal is the way that millions of taxpayer pounds were spent buying tanks in numbers that rested on questionable of assumptions. However, to be fair, people did not make them up out of knavery - just having to hazard a guess with little backup.
Linking this back to Future Carrier - drop tank stowages can be extremely emotive - they are real space gobblers, hard to get at, absolute swines to maintain, and rarely in the right number or right place. If the sort of provisioning rates were applied to carrier borne aircraft, we'd need one carrier just to carry spare drop tanks for the other one!
My experience of using tanks from deep storage was that after a few years, these items were basically useless (out of mod state and all seals dried up).
Regards
Engines