  Classical transport theory for colored particles is reviewed and used to
derive the hard thermal loops of QCD. A perturbative study of the non-Abelian
transport equations that preserves their gauge symmetry is used to compute the
induced color current in a hot quark-gluon plasma. From this approach the
effective action of hard thermal loops can be derived. 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 classical.
