maven war overlay won't exclude dependancies

I have a project where I am attempting to overlay a pre-built war with a compiled jar from another module and some files in the war project.

+pom.xml
|
+-+depandancy_dir
| |
| + source.war
|
+-+ jar
| |
| + pom.xml
| + src
|  ...
|
+-+war_dir
  |
  + pom.xml
  + src
    .... no jars

I want to exclude some of the jars that are configured as maven dependencies for the jar.

I have tried all of the following exclude lines in the pom for the war. the undesired jar shows up regardless.

        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
            <configuration>
                <dependentWarExcludes>**/unwanted-core-1.1.jar</dependentWarExcludes>
                <overlays>
                    <overlay>
                       <groupId>src.war</groupId>
                       <artifactId>base.war</artifactId>

                       <excludes>
                            <exclude>**/unwanted-core-1.1.jar</exclude>     
                            <packagingExcludes>**/unwanted-core-1.1.jar</packagingExcludes>                           
                            <exclude>WEB-INF/lib/unwanted-core-1.1.jar</exclude>     
                            <packagingExcludes>WEB-INF/lib/unwanted-core-1.1.jar</packagingExcludes>                           
                       </excludes>

                    </overlay>
                </overlays>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>

I am running maven under eclipse. The war plugin reports version maven-war-plugin:2.2:war

Turns out I was attempting to solve the problem the wrong way. The exclusion goes on the dependency.

  <dependencies>
        <dependency>
        <!-- the jar of custom code -->
            <groupId>my.group</groupId>
            <artifactId>jar</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
            <exclusions>
               <exclusion>  <!-- declare the exclusion here -->
                    <groupId>org.unwanted</groupId>
                    <artifactId>unwanted-core</artifactId>
               </exclusion>
            </exclusions>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
<!-- the war I am overlaying -->
            <groupId>my.group</groupId>
            <artifactId>a.base.war</artifactId>
            <version>1.0</version>
            <scope>system</scope>
            <systemPath>${basedir}/../dependancies/jreport.war</systemPath>
            <type>war</type>
        </dependency>

  </dependencies>

The following links helped me.

https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-optional-and-excludes-dependencies.html

Maven: remove a single transitive dependency