missing element does not trigger any warning

spot the subtle error in below pom :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project>
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>org.my.project</groupId>
<artifactId>myProject</artifactId>
<version>0.1</version>
<name>The Project</name>
<packaging>jar</packaging>
<repositories>
<repository>
<id>apache-maven2-snapshot</id>
<name>Apache Maven2 Snapshot Repository</name>
<url>http://cvs.apache.org/maven-snapshot-repository</url>
</repository>
</repositories>
<dependencies>
<groupId>org.apache.cocoon</groupId>
<artifactId>cocoon-core</artifactId>
<version>2.2.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependencies>
</project>

The dependency element is missing inside <dependencies>. Maven did not give any warning or error though.

Note that in my actual project, the dependency was not needed for compilation