Dropping droptanks

Hallo,
i wonder how common is it, to really drop your droptanks in an combat
situation.
And if you do it, will somebody be upset that you lost these "valuable
peaces of equipment"?

I ask this because i was in the early eighties in the 42nd Materialdepot
of the German airforce and had to store several 600gallon F4 tanks. But
i never had to hand out one. But i think in an combat situation we would
have run out of these pretty fast.
Bye the way: next morning after storing these tanks i got my picture
with the headline " the Depot ist storing rockets" in the local
newspaper.
From outside of the fence you could see the fins of the tanks through
the wooden frames of their containers.
This was in a time where there were protest aginst nuclearweapons
(Pershings and so on) in Europe.
The local politics ran wild and we found it really funny. So far for
good journalism.

Greetings Max