Nov. 23 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. military’s review of the Fort Hood shootings must include an assessment of the accused shooter’s career path and whether he should have been promoted, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Gates said the military also should investigate whether Army policies and procedures would inhibit the discharge of a soldier who was found “not to be fully qualified or unsuitable for continued” service and how these findings might apply to Major Nidal Malik Hasan.

Hasan, 39, an Army psychiatrist, has been charged by military authorities with 13 counts of premeditated murder in the Nov. 5 shootings on the Fort Hood, Texas, base, in which 13 people were killed and 43 injured.

Gates’s request is included in a three-page memo released by the Pentagon today. The memo said officials should “assess whether Army and other programs, policies and procedures functioned properly across the alleged perpetrator’s career as a military health care provider. to retain and promote him within in the Army Medical Corps.”

Hasan entered the Army Medical Corps in June 1997 upon graduating from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, known as Virginia Tech. He got a medical degree from the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland.

He served at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington from June 2003 to July of this year as an intern, resident and then as a psychiatry fellow. He was promoted to major in May 2009, and moved to Fort Hood in July.

Pentagon Probe

Former Army Secretary Togo West and retired Admiral Vernon Clark, a former chief of the U.S. Navy, will lead the 45-day review. Clark was Navy chief from 2000 to 2005; West was Army secretary from 1993 to 1998 and was then secretary of veterans affairs until 2000.

A military magistrate who conducted a hearing Saturday with Hasan at Brooke Army Medical Center “determined that pretrial confinement is appropriate for Hasan,” Fort Hood spokesman Christopher Haug said in an e-mail statement.

To contact the reporters on this story: Anthony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.net;

Last Updated: November 23, 2009 16:49 EST