Is the maven surefire plugin needed to run unit tests?

Is the maven surefire plugin need to run unit tests when using the mvn clean test command?

I read the documentation and know it says that:

The Surefire Plugin is used during the test phase of the build lifecycle to execute the unit tests of an application. It generates reports in two different file formats:

Plain text files (.txt) XML files (.xml) By default, these files are generated at ${basedir}/target/surefire-reports.

However, I ran the tests without using the surefire plugin and they all passed.