Maven error

In case someone comes accross the same problem - I came hit this exception and fixed it by deleting my target directory and clean-ing the project from Eclipse to rebuild the classes.

[INFO] [war:war]
[INFO] Packaging webapp
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] FATAL ERROR
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] modelEncoding : modelEncoding
---- Debugging information ----
message : modelEncoding : modelEncoding
cause-exception : com.thoughtworks.xstream.mapper.CannotResolveClassException
cause-message : modelEncoding : modelEncoding
class : org.apache.maven.plugin.war.util.WebappStructure
required-type : org.apache.maven.model.Dependency
path : /webapp-structure/dependenciesInfo/org.apache.maven.plugin.war.util.DependencyInfo/dependency/modelEncoding
line number : 1108
-------------------------------
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Trace
com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.ConversionException: modelEncoding : modelEncoding
---- Debugging information ----
message : modelEncoding : modelEncoding
cause-exception : com.thoughtworks.xstream.mapper.CannotResolveClassException
cause-message : modelEncoding : modelEncoding
class : org.apache.maven.plugin.war.util.WebappStructure
required-type : org.apache.maven.model.Dependency
path : /webapp-structure/dependenciesInfo/org.apache.maven.plugin.war.util.DependencyInfo/dependency/modelEncoding
line number : 1108
-------------------------------
at com.thoughtworks.xstream.core.TreeUnmarshaller.convert(TreeUnmarshaller.java:63)