How can i erase a cached file in apache maven?

Recently apache maven seems to have caching problems Performing clean installs on our projects with windows vista or windows 7 sometimes produces artifacts with the same data as a previous build even though the newer artifact's files should have been

Is there any way to clear this cache to force maven to always trigger a clean build of the local artifact that should be built?

We're particularly having issues building a webapp with the war plugin Maven version is 3.0.3. War plugin version is 2.1.1.

Delete the artifacts (or the full local repo) from c:\Users\<username>\.m2\repository by hand.