This paper investigates whether and when route reservation-based (RB) communication can yield better delay performance than non-reservation-based (NRB) communication in ad hoc wireless networks. In addition to posing this fundamental question, the requirements (in terms of route discovery, medium access control (MAC) protocol, and pipelining, etc.) for making RB switching superior to NRB switching are also identified. A novel analytical framework is developed and the network performance under both RB and NRB schemes is quantified. It is shown that if the aforementioned requirements are met, then RB schemes can indeed yield better delay performance than NRB schemes. This advantage, however, comes at the expense of lower throughput and goodput compared to NRB schemes.