Quick! What's another word for "pissing match?"?

I just finished an essay about the disparity in usefulness between offensive and defensive technology in World War One, and I’m ending with the moral rhetorical question of how many soldiers and civilians had to die in the technological “pissing match” between world powers that the war represented.

The problem is that I don’t think “pissing match” is a very scholarly phrase, and Google isn’t giving me any equally impactful, yet more academic alternatives. Help?