  We develop a picture of the QCD string as a chain of constituent gluons,
bound by attractive nearest-neighbor forces which may be treated
perturbatively. This picture accounts for both Casimir scaling at large N, and
the asymptotic center dependence of the static quark potential. We discuss the
relevance, to the gluon-chain picture, of recent three-loop results for the
static quark potential. A variational framework is presented for computing the
minimal energy and wavefunction of a long gluon chain, which enables us to
derive both the logarithmic broadening of the QCD flux tube (``roughening''),
and the existence of a Luscher -c/R term in the potential.
