  Mean-field treatments of Yang-Mills theory face the problem of how to treat
the Gauss law constraint. In this paper we try to face this problem by studying
the excited states instead of the ground state. For this purpose we extend the
operator approach to the Random Phase Approximation (RPA) well-known from
nuclear physics and recently also employed in pion physics to general bosonic
theories with a standard kinetic term. We focus especially on conservation
laws, and how they are translated from the full to the approximated theories,
demonstrate that the operator approach has the same spectrum as the RPA derived
from the time-dependent variational principle, and give - for Yang-Mills theory
- a discussion of the moment of inertia connected to the energy contribution of
the zero modes to the RPA ground state energy. We also indicate a line of
thought that might be useful to improve the results of the Random Phase
Approximation.
