Why do I have to specify a war goal when running tomcat:exploded or tomcat:inplace ? Because there's currently no way for a goal to depend upon another plugin's goal. See MNG-1649 for more information. Why do I have to specify a war goal when running tomcat:redeploy ? Because the different methods of deployment have different prerequisites - it would be tiresome to always package the WAR if you were just deploying an exploded WAR.