  Classical transport theory for colored particles is investigated and employed
to derive the hard thermal loops of QCD. A formal construction of phase-space
for color degrees of freedom is presented. The gauge invariance of the
non-Abelian Vlasov equations is verified and used as a guiding principle in our
approximation scheme.We then derive the generating functional of hard thermal
loops from a constraint satisfied at leading-order by the color current. This
derivation is more direct than alternative ones based on perturbative quantum
field theory, and shows that hard thermal effects in hot QCD are essentially
{\it classical}. As an illustration, we analyze color polarization in the QCD
plasma.
