With Struts2 we have to have struts.xml in the class path, so it no longer works to have it under WEB-INF. So the way I got my project to deploy was to stick it und
With Struts 1.2, it was required to put the struts-config.xml in the classpath (under WEB-INF folder) but with Struts 2.0, it is required to be in src/main/resources folder.
See the documentation Struts 2 Documentation here
I pasted struts.xml in this directory and the project executed fine.